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Philosophy
A compelling intellectual and literary history of midcentury America
In a midcentury American cultural episode forgotten today, intellectuals of all schools shared a belief that human nature was under threat. The immediate result was a glut of dense, abstract books on the nature of man. But the dawning age of the crisis of man, as Mark Greif calls it, was far more than a historical curiosity. In this ambitious intellectual and literary history, Greif recovers this lost line of thought to show how it influenced society, politics, and culture before, during, and long after World War II. During the 1930s and 1940s, fears of the barbarization of humanity energized New York intellectuals, Chicago protoconservatives, European Jewish émigrés, and native-born bohemians to seek re-enlightenment, a new philosophical account of human nature and history. After the war this effort diffused, leading to a rebirth of modern human rights and a new power for the literary arts. Critics' predictions of a death of the novel challenged writers to invest bloodless questions of human nature with flesh and detail. Hemingway, Faulkner, and Richard Wright wrote flawed novels of abstract man. Succeeding them, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Flannery O'Connor, and Thomas Pynchon constituted a new guard who tested philosophical questions against social realities--race, religious faith, and the rise of technology--that kept difference and diversity alive. By the 1960s, the idea of universal man gave way to moral antihumanism, as new sensibilities and social movements transformed what had come before. Greif's reframing of a foundational debate takes us beyond old antagonisms into a new future, and gives a prehistory to the fractures of our own era.
We all age differently, but we can learn from shared experiences and insights. The conversations, or paired essays, in Aging Thoughtfully combine a philosopher's approach with a lawyer-economist's. Here are ideas about when to retire, how to refashion social security to help the elderly poor, how to learn from King Lear -- who did not retire successfully -- and whether to enjoy or criticize anti-aging cosmetic procedures. Some of the concerns are practical: philanthropic decisions, relations with one's children and grandchildren, the purchase of annuities, and how to provide for care in old age. Other topics are cultural, ranging from the treatment of aging women in a Strauss opera and various popular films, to a consideration of Donald Trump's (and other men's) marriages to much younger women. These engaging, thoughtful, and often humorous exchanges show how stimulating discussions about our inevitable aging can be, and offer valuable insight into how we all might age more thoughtfully, and with zest and friendship.
An argument that love requires the courage to accept self-negation for the sake of discovering the Other.
Byung-Chul Han is one of the most widely read philosophers in Europe today, a member of the new generation of German thinkers that includes Markus Gabriel and Armen Avanessian. In The Agony of Eros, a bestseller in Germany, Han considers the threat to love and desire in today's society. For Han, love requires the courage to accept self-negation for the sake of discovering the Other. In a world of fetishized individualism and technologically mediated social interaction, it is the Other that is eradicated, not the self. In today's increasingly narcissistic society, we have come to look for love and desire within the "inferno of the same."
Han offers a survey of the threats to Eros, drawing on a wide range of sources--Lars von Trier's film Melancholia, Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, Fifty Shades of Grey, Michel Foucault (providing a scathing critique of Foucault's valorization of power), Martin Buber, Hegel, Baudrillard, Flaubert, Barthes, Plato, and others. Han considers the "pornographication" of society, and shows how pornography profanes eros; addresses capitalism's leveling of essential differences; and discusses the politics of eros in today's "burnout society." To be dead to love, Han argues, is to be dead to thought itself.
Concise in its expression but unsparing in its insight, The Agony of Eros is an important and provocative entry in Han's ongoing analysis of contemporary society.
This remarkable essay, an intellectual experience of the first order, affords one of the best ways to gain full awareness of and join in one of the most pressing struggles of the day: the defense, that is to say--as Rimbaud desired it--the "reinvention" of love.
--from the foreword by Alain Badiou
Baudrillard's unsettling coda: previously unpublished texts written just before the visionary theorist's death in 2007.
History that repeats itself turns to farce. But a farce that repeats itself ends up making a history.--from The Agony of Power
In these previously unpublished manuscripts written just before his death in 2007, Jean Baudrillard takes a last crack at the bewildering situation currently facing us as we exit the system of "domination" (based on alienation, revolt, revolution) and enter a world of generalized "hegemony" in which everyone becomes both hostage and accomplice of the global market. But in the free-form market of political and sexual liberation, as the possibility of revolution (and our understanding of it) dissipates, Baudrillard sees the hegemonic process as only beginning. Once expelled, negativity returns from within ourselves as an antagonistic force--most vividly in the phenomenon of terrorism, but also as irony, mockery, and the symbolic liquidation of all human values. This is the dimension of hegemony marked by an unbridled circulation--of capital, goods, information, or manufactured history--that is bringing the very concept of exchange to an end and pushing capital beyond its limits: to the point at which it destroys the conditions of its own existence. In the system of hegemony, the alienated, the oppressed, and the colonized find themselves on the side of the system that holds them hostage. In this paradoxical moment in which history has turned to farce, domination itself may appear to have been a lesser evil.This book gathers together three essays--"From Domination to Hegemony," "The White Terror of World Order," and "Where Good Grows"--and a 2005 interview with Baudrillard by Sylvère Lotringer. Semiotext(e) launched Baudrillard into English back in the early 1980s; now, as our media and information infested "ultra-reality" finally catches up with his theory, Semiotext(e) offers The Agony of Power, Baudrillard's unsettling coda.
Composed in a series of scenes, Aisthesis-Rancière's definitive statement on the aesthetic-takes its reader from Dresden in 1764 to New York in 1941. Along the way, we view the Belvedere Torso with Winckelmann, accompany Hegel to the museum and Mallarmé to the Folies-Bergère, attend a lecture by Emerson, visit exhibitions in Paris and New York, factories in Berlin, and film sets in Moscow and Hollywood. Rancière uses these sites and events--some famous, others forgotten--to ask what becomes art and what comes of it. He shows how a regime of artistic perception and interpretation was constituted and transformed by erasing the specificities of the different arts, as well as the borders that separated them from ordinary experience. This incisive study provides a history of artistic modernity far removed from the conventional postures of modernism.
A world-renowned philosopher's genre-defying exploration of the mystery of consciousness In a blossoming garden located far outside all worlds, a group of aging Greek gods have gathered to discuss the nature of existence, the mystery of mind, and whether there is a transcendent God from whom all things come. Turning to Eros, Psyche asks, "Do you see this flower, my love?" So begins David Bentley Hart's unprecedented exploration of the mystery of consciousness. Writing in the form of a Platonic dialogue, he systematically subjects the mechanical view of nature that has prevailed in Western culture for four centuries to dialectical interrogation. Powerfully rehabilitating a classical view in which mental acts are irreducible to material causes, he argues through the gods' exchanges that the foundation of all reality is spiritual or mental rather than material. The structures of mind, organic life, and even language together attest to an infinite act of intelligence in all things that we may as well call God. Engaging contemporary debates on the philosophy of mind, free will, revolutions in physics and biology, the history of science, computational models of mind, artificial intelligence, information theory, linguistics, cultural disenchantment, and the metaphysics of nature, Hart calls readers back to an enchanted world in which nature is the residence of mysterious and vital intelligences. He suggests that there is a very special wisdom to be gained when we, in Psyche's words, "devote more time to the contemplation of living things and less to the fabrication of machines."
Also sprach Zarathustra ist ein dichterisch-philosophisches Werk des deutschen Philosophen Friedrich Nietzsche. In hymnischer Prosa berichtet ein personaler Erzähler vom Wirken eines fiktiven Denkers, der den Namen des persischen Religionsstifters Zarathustra trägt. Nietzsche selbst nennt den Stil, in dem Also sprach Zarathustra geschrieben ist, halkyonisch und wünscht sich Leser, die eines "gleichen Pathos fähig und würdig sind": "Man muss vor Allem den Ton, der aus diesem Munde kommt, diesen halkyonischen Ton richtig hören, um dem Sinn seiner Weisheit nicht erbarmungswürdig Unrecht zu tun." Dass Nietzsche diese Leserschaft in seiner Gegenwart nicht gesehen hat, legt der Untertitel des Werkes nahe: "Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen."
A passionate call for independent thinking
We have lost our amateur spirit and need to rediscover the radical and liberating pleasure of doing things we love.
In The Amateur, thinker Andy Merrifield shows us how the many spheres of our lives--work, knowledge, home, politics--have fallen into the hands of box tickers, bean counters and pedants. In response, he corrals a team of independent thinkers, wayward poets, dabblers and square pegs who challenge accepted wisdom. Such figures as Charles Baudelaire, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Edward Said, Guy Debord, Hannah Arendt and Jane Jacobs show us the way. As we will see, the amateur takes risks, thinks the unthinkable, seeks independence--and changes the world. The Amateur is a passionate manifesto for the liberated life, one that questions authority and reclaims the iconoclast as a radical hero of our times.
From the sierras of New Mexico to the streets of New York and LA by night--"a sort of luminous, geometric, incandescent immensity"--Baudrillard mixes aperçus and observations with a wicked sense of fun to provide a unique insight into the country that dominates our world. In this new edition, leading cultural critic and novelist Geoff Dyer offers a thoughtful and perceptive take on the continued resonance of Baudrillard's America.
This bold, insightful book argues that America today towers as the most philosophical culture in the history of the world, an unprecedented marketplace for truth and debate.
With verve and keen intelligence, Carlin Romano--Pulitzer Prize finalist, award-winning book critic, and professor of philosophy--takes on the widely held belief that the United States is an anti-intellectual country. Instead he provides a richly reported overview of American thought, arguing that ordinary Americans see through phony philosophical justifications faster than anyone else, and that the best of our thinkers ditch artificial academic debates for fresh intellectual enterprises. Along the way, Romano seeks to topple philosophy's most fiercely admired hero, Socrates, asserting that it is Isocrates, the nearly forgotten Greek philosopher who rejected certainty, whom Americans should honor as their intellectual ancestor. America the Philosophical is a rebellious tour de force that both celebrates our country's unparalleled intellectual energy and promises to bury some of our most hidebound cultural clichés.
If you were looking for a philosopher likely to appeal to Americans, Friedrich Nietzsche would be far from your first choice. After all, in his blazing career, Nietzsche took aim at nearly all the foundations of modern American life: Christian morality, the Enlightenment faith in reason, and the idea of human equality. Despite that, for more than a century Nietzsche has been a hugely popular--and surprisingly influential--figure in American thought and culture.
In American Nietzsche, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen delves deeply into Nietzsche's philosophy, and America's reception of it, to tell the story of his curious appeal. Beginning her account with Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom the seventeen-year-old Nietzsche read fervently, she shows how Nietzsche's ideas first burst on American shores at the turn of the twentieth century, and how they continued alternately to invigorate and to shock Americans for the century to come. She also delineates the broader intellectual and cultural contexts within which a wide array of commentators--academic and armchair philosophers, theologians and atheists, romantic poets and hard-nosed empiricists, and political ideologues and apostates from the Left and the Right--drew insight and inspiration from Nietzsche's claims for the death of God, his challenge to universal truth, and his insistence on the interpretive nature of all human thought and beliefs. At the same time, she explores how his image as an iconoclastic immoralist was put to work in American popular culture, making Nietzsche an unlikely posthumous celebrity capable of inspiring both teenagers and scholars alike. A penetrating examination of a powerful but little-explored undercurrent of twentieth-century American thought and culture, American Nietzsche dramatically recasts our understanding of American intellectual life--and puts Nietzsche squarely at its heart.
Transcendentalism was the first major intellectual movement in U.S. history, championing the inherent divinity of each individual, as well as the value of collective social action. In the mid-nineteenth century, the movement took off, changing how Americans thought about religion, literature, the natural world, class distinctions, the role of women, and the existence of slavery.
Edited by the eminent scholar Lawrence Buell, this comprehensive anthology contains the essential writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and their fellow visionaries. There are also reflections on the movement by Charles Dickens, Henry James, Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. This remarkable volume introduces the radical innovations of a brilliant group of thinkers whose impact on religious thought, social reform, philosophy, and literature continues to reverberate in the twenty-first century.
Edited by the eminent scholar Lawrence Buell, this comprehensive anthology contains the essential writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and their fellow visionaries. There are also reflections on the movement by Charles Dickens, Henry James, Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. This remarkable volume introduces the radical innovations of a brilliant group of thinkers whose impact on religious thought, social reform, philosophy, and literature continues to reverberate in the twenty-first century.
In his acclaimed #1 New York Times bestseller, Mark R. Levin explores the psychology, motivations, and history of the utopian movement, its architects--the Founding Fathers, and its modern-day disciples--and how the individual and American society are being devoured by it. Levin asks, what is this utopian force that both allures a free people and destroys them? Levin digs deep into the past and draws astoundingly relevant parallels to contemporary America from Plato's Republic, Thomas More's Utopia, Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, and Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, as well as from the critical works of John Locke, Charles Montesquieu, Alexis de Tocqueville, and other philosophical pioneers who brilliantly diagnosed the nature of man and government. As Levin meticulously pursues his subject, the reader joins him in an enlightening and compelling journey. And in the end, Levin's message is clear: the American republic is in great peril. The people must now choose between utopianism or liberty. President Ronald Reagan warned, "freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction." Levin agrees, and with Ameritopia, delivers another modern political classic, an indispensable guide for America in our time and in the future.
Winner of the 1975 National Book Award, this brilliant and widely acclaimed book is a powerful philosophical challenge to the most widely held political and social positions of our age--liberal, socialist, and conservative.
A new and original anthology that introduces the use of rhetoric in the classical world, from Aristotle to Cicero and beyond
Classical rhetoric is one of the earliest versions of what is today known as media studies. It was absolutely crucial to life in the ancient world, whether in the courtroom, the legislature, or on ceremonial occasions, and was described as either the art of persuasion or the art of speaking well. This anthology brings together all the most important ancient writings on rhetoric, including works by Cicero, Aristotle, Quintilian, and Philostratus. Ranging across such themes as memory, persuasion, delivery, and style, it provides a fascinating introduction to classical rhetoric and will be an invaluable sourcebook for students of the ancient world. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,800 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Classical rhetoric is one of the earliest versions of what is today known as media studies. It was absolutely crucial to life in the ancient world, whether in the courtroom, the legislature, or on ceremonial occasions, and was described as either the art of persuasion or the art of speaking well. This anthology brings together all the most important ancient writings on rhetoric, including works by Cicero, Aristotle, Quintilian, and Philostratus. Ranging across such themes as memory, persuasion, delivery, and style, it provides a fascinating introduction to classical rhetoric and will be an invaluable sourcebook for students of the ancient world. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,800 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
"[Thich Nhat Hanh] shows us the connection between personal, inner peace and peace on earth." -His Holiness The Dalai Lama Nominated by Martin Luther King, Jr. for a Nobel Peace Prize, Thich Nhat Hanh is one of today's leading sources of wisdom, peace, compassion and comfort. It was under the bodhi tree in India twenty-five centuries ago that Buddha achieved the insight that three states of mind were the source of all our unhappiness: wrong knowing, obsessive desire, and anger. All are difficult, but in one instant of anger--one of the most powerful emotions--lives can be ruined, and health and spiritual development can be destroyed. With exquisite simplicity, Buddhist monk and Vietnam refugee Thich Nhat Hanh gives tools and advice for transforming relationships, focusing energy, and rejuvenating those parts of ourselves that have been laid waste by anger. His extraordinary wisdom can transform your life and the lives of the people you love, and in the words of Thich Nhat Hanh, can give each reader the power "to change everything."
nimal, Mineral, Vegetable examines what happens when we cease to assume that only humans exert agency. Through a careful examination of medieval, early modern and contemporary lifeworlds, these essays collectively argue against ecological anthropocentricity. Sheep, wolves, camels, flowers, chairs, magnets, landscapes, refuse and gems are more than mere objects. They act; they withdraw; they make demands; they connect within lively networks that might foster a new humanism, or that might proceed with indifference towards human affairs. Through what ethics do we respond to these activities and forces? To what futures do these creatures and objects invite us, especially when they appear within the texts and cultures of the "distant" past?
Jeffrey J. Cohen: "Introduction: All Things" - Karl Steel: "With the World, or Bound to Face the Sky: The Postures of the Wolf-Child of Hesse" - Sharon Kinoshita: "Animals and the Medieval Culture of Empire" - Peggy McCracken: "The Floral and the Human" - Kellie Robertson: "Exemplary Rocks" - Valerie Allen: "Mineral Virtue" - Eileen Joy: "You Are Here: A Manifesto" - Julian Yates: "Sheep Tracks: Multi-Species Impressions" - Julia Reinhard Lupton: "The Renaissance Res Publica of Things" - Jane Bennett: "Powers of the Hoard: Further Notes on Material Agency"
Response essays: Lowell Duckert: "Speaking Stones, John Muir, and a Slower (Non)humanities" - Nedda Mehdizadeh: "'Ruinous Monument' Transporting Objects in Herbert's Persepolis" - Jonathan Gil Harris: "Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Twenty Questions"