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Walking the Way
by Sojun Mel Weitsman Robert RosenbaumWalking the Way affirms that, like yin and yang, the flowing spontaneity of Tao and the precise simplicity of Zen find perfect balance with one another. Robert Meikyo Rosenbaum brings the two traditions together in a unique presentation that elicits Zen insights from his fresh interpretation of verses from the Taoist classic, the Tao Te Ching. Personal anecdotes illustrate the dynamic potential of Rosenbaum's approach, skillfully revealing Zen within the Tao and the Tao of Zen. Not only does the author reveal the elegance of each tradition, he shows how their interrelatedness does, in fact, have import on our meditative practices and on our day-to-day lives. Parenting, meditating, dealing with setbacks and illnesses--Walking the Way shows us how to live well in the midst of many complex demands, finding harmony and equilibrium between honing in and letting go, balance between being ourselves and selflessly serving others.
Walking through Elysium: Vergil’s Underworld and the Poetics of Tradition (Phoenix Supplementary Volumes)
Walking through Elysium stresses the subtle and intricate ways writers across time and space wove Vergil’s underworld in Aeneid 6 into their works. These allusions operate on many levels, from the literary and political to the religious and spiritual. Aeneid 6 reshaped prior philosophical, religious, and poetic traditions of underworld descents, while offering a universalizing account of the spiritual that could accommodate prior as well as emerging religious and philosophical systems. Vergil’s underworld became an archetype, a model flexible enough to be employed across genres, and periods, and among differing cultural and religious contexts. The essays in this volume speak to Vergil’s incorporation of and influence on literary representations of underworlds, souls, afterlives, prophecies, journeys, and spaces, from sacred and profane to wild and civilized, tracing the impact of Vergil’s underworld on authors such as Ovid, Seneca, Statius, Augustine, and Shelley, from Pagan and Christian traditions through Romantic and Spiritualist readings. Walking through Elysium asserts the deep and lasting influence of Vergil’s underworld from the moment of its publication to the present day.
Walking Wisely
by Charles F. StanleyDR. . CHARLES STANLEY cuts through the" "MYSTIQUE OF WISDOM AND PRESENTS GOD's SIMPLE" PLAN TO BLESS THOSE WHO WALK IN HIS WAYS.
Walking with A/r/tography (Palgrave Studies in Movement across Education, the Arts and the Social Sciences)
by Rita L. Irwin Alexandra Lasczik Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles David Rousell Nicole LeeThis book focuses on critical walking and mapping practices through the research methodology of a/r/tography. Initially establishing seven global sites for employing movement-based research practices within culturally conceived a/r/tographic perspectives, the book builds upon and extends an international community of practice. The editors and contributors apply public pedagogy through a/r/tographic and critical walking inquiry, and explore how these forms may be engaged, understood and expanded globally. The chapters examine how a/r/tography and walking inquiry can be practiced, theorised, experienced, extended and conceptualised. The cartographic perspectives, theoretical positions and conceptual investigations included in this collection respond to the fundamental contemporary need for new and fresh models of teaching, learning and scholarship regarding global and local educational and social challenges. They offer tangible, aesthetic and rigorous examples for researchers, educators, community practitioners and research students to engage with a/r/tography and critical walking inquiry.
Walking with Plato: A Philosophical Hike Through the British Isles
by Gary HaydenAll truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.' So said Friedrich Nietzsche, and so thought philosophy buff Gary Hayden as he set off on Britain's most challenging trek: to walk from John o'Groats to Land's End.But it wasn't all quaint country lanes, picture-postcard villages and cosy bed and breakfasts. Disillusioned after another gruelling day, his feet blistered and his back aching from lugging camping gear, he sought solace in the words of Plato: 'Everything that deceives may be said to enchant.'In this humorous, uplifting and delightfully British tale, Gary finds solitude and weary limbs bring him closer to the wisdom of the world's greatest thinkers. Recalling Rousseau's reverie, Bertrand Russell's misery, Epicurus' joy in simplicity and Thoreau's love of the wilderness, Walking with Plato offers a breath of fresh, country air for anyone craving an escape from the humdrum of everyday life.
Wallace Stevens and Martin Heidegger: Poetry as Appropriative Proximity (American Literature Readings in the 21st Century)
by Ian TanThis book is a unique contribution to scholarship of the poetics of Wallace Stevens, offering an analysis of the entire oeuvre of Stevens’s poetry using the philosophical framework of Martin Heidegger. Marking the first book-length engagement with a philosophical reading of Stevens, it uses Heidegger’s theories as a framework through which Stevens’s poetry can be read and shows how philosophy and literature can enter into a productive dialogue. It also makes a case for a Heideggerian reading of poetry, exploring his later philosophy with respect to his writing on art, language, and poetry. Taking Stevens’s repeated emphasis on the terms “being”, “consciousness”, “reality” and “truth” as its starting point, the book provides a new reading of Stevens with a philosopher who aligns poetic insight with a reconceptualization of the metaphysical significance of these concepts. It pursues the link between philosophy, American poetry as reflected through Stevens, and modernist poetics, looking from Stevens’s modernist techniques to broader European philosophical movements of the twentieth century.
Wallace Stevens and Pre-Socratic Philosophy: Metaphysics and the Play of Violence (Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature)
by Daniel TompsettThis book studies Wallace Stevens and pre-Socratic philosophy, showing how concepts that animate Stevens’ poetry parallel concepts and techniques found in the poetic works of Parmenides, Empedocles, and Xenophanes, and in the fragments of Heraclitus. Tompsett traces the transition of pre-Socratic ideas into poetry and philosophy of the post-Kantian period, assessing the impact that the mythologies associated with pre-Socratism have had on structures of metaphysical thought that are still found in poetry and philosophy today. This transition is treated as becoming increasingly important as poetic and philosophic forms have progressively taken on the existential burden of our post-theological age. Tompsett argues that Stevens’ poetry attempts to ‘play’ its audience into an ontological ground in an effort to show that his ‘reduction of metaphysics’ is not dry philosophical imposition, but is enacted by our encounter with the poems themselves. Through an analysis of the language and form of Stevens’ poems, Tompsett uncovers the mythology his poetry shares with certain pre-Socratics and with Greek tragedy. This shows how such mythic rhythms are apparent within the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, and how these rhythms release a poetic understanding of the violence of a ‘reduction of metaphysics.’
Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship
by Gershom Scholem Lee Sigel Harry ZohnGershom Scholem is celebrated as the twentieth century's most profound student of the Jewish mystical tradition; Walter Benjamin, as a master thinker whose extraordinary essays mix the revolutionary, the revelatory, and the esoteric. Scholem was a precocious teenager when he met Benjamin, who became his close friend and intellectual mentor. His account of that relationship--which was to remain crucial for both men--is both a celebration of his friend's spellbinding genius and a lament for the personal and intellectual self-destructiveness that culminated in Benjamin's suicide in 1940. At once prickly and heartbroken, argumentative and loving, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship is an absorbing memoir with the complication of character and motive of a novel. As Scholem revisits the passionate engagements over Marxism and Kabbala, Europe and Palestine that he shared with Benjamin, it is as if he sought to summon up his lost friend's spirit again, to have the last word in the argument that might have saved his life.
Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism #7)
by Richard WolinFew twentieth-century thinkers have proven as influential as Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish philosopher and cultural and literary critic. Richard Wolin's book remains among the clearest and most insightful introductions to Benjamin's writings, offering a philosophically rich exposition of his complex relationship to Adorno, Brecht, Jewish Messianism, and Western Marxism. Wolin provides nuanced interpretations of Benjamin's widely studied writings on Baudelaire, historiography, and art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In a new Introduction written especially for this edition, Wolin discusses the unfinished Arcades Project, as well as recent tendencies in the reception of Benjamin's work and the relevance of his ideas to contemporary debates about modernity and postmodernity.
Walter Benjamin and Antonio Gramsci: A Missed Encounter (Marx and Marxisms)
by Elettra Stimilli Dario Gentili Gabriele GuerraThis book marks a missed encounter between two of the most influential Marxist thinkers of our age, Walter Benjamin and Antonio Gramsci, studied here for the first time side by side.Benjamin and Gramsci were contemporaries, whose births and deaths took place within a few years of each other in Western Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Two Marxists sui generis, they radically changed Marxism’s themes and vocabulary, profoundly influencing the most significant analyses and debates. At a time in which Marxism was considered to be outdated and in crisis, both Gramsci’s and Benjamin’s thoughts provided resources for its renewal: particularly in postcolonial studies for Gramsci and in new media studies for Benjamin. Both were victims of fascism, on the threshold of the catastrophe of the Second World War. These two philosophers’ posthumous fortune depended on the transmission of their thought, which was first entrusted to friends and comrades, and then to entire generations of scholars from a wide range of disciplines.Editors, Dario Gentili, Elettra Stimilli, and Gabriele Guerra explore with leading voices on Benjamin and Gramsci the most relevant and topical issues today. The book gives an indispensable new perspective in Marxism for students and researchers alike.
Walter Benjamin and the Idea of Natural History (Cultural Memory in the Present)
by Eli FriedlanderIn this incisive new work, Eli Friedlander demonstrates that Walter Benjamin's entire corpus, from early to late, comprises a rigorous and sustained philosophical questioning of how human beings belong to nature. Across seemingly heterogeneous writings, Friedlander argues, Benjamin consistently explores what the natural in the human comes to, that is, how nature is transformed, actualized, redeemed, and overcome in human existence. The book progresses gradually from Benjamin's philosophically fundamental writings on language and nature to his Goethean empiricism, from the presentation of ideas to the primal history of the Paris arcades. Friedlander's careful analysis brings out how the idea of natural history inflects Benjamin's conception of the work of art and its critique, his diagnosis of the mythical violence of the legal order, his account of the body and of action, of material culture and technology, as well as his unique vision of historical materialism. Featuring revelatory new readings of Benjamin's major works that differ, sometimes dramatically, from prevailing interpretations, this book reveals the internal coherence and philosophical force of Benjamin's thought.
Walter Benjamin and Theology
by Stéphane Symons Colby DickinsonIn the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin writes that his work is “related to theology as blotting pad is related to ink. It is saturated with it.” For a thinker so decisive to critical literary, cultural, political, and aesthetic writings over the past half-century, Benjamin’s relationship to theological matters has been less observed than it should, even despite a variety of attempts over the last four decades to illuminate the theological elements latent within his eclectic and occasional writings. Such attempts, though undeniably crucial to comprehending his thought, remain in need of deepened systematic analysis. In bringing together some of the most renowned experts from both sides of the Atlantic, Walter Benjamin and Theology seeks to establish a new site from which to address both the issue of Benjamin’s relationship with theology and all the crucial aspects that Benjamin himself grappled with when addressing the field and operations of theological inquiry.
Walter Benjamin, Religion and Aesthetics: Rethinking Religion through the Arts
by S. Brent PlateWalter Benjamin, Religion, and Aesthetics is an innovative and creative attempt to unsettle and reconceive the key concepts of religious studies through a reading with, and against, Walter Benjamin. Constructing what he calls an "allegorical aesthetics," Plate sifts through Benjamin's writings showing how his concepts of art, allegory, and experience undo traditionally stabilizing religious concepts such as myth, symbol, memory, narrative, creation, and redemption.
Walter Benjamin - Selected Writings (Volume 2, 1931-1934)
by Walter Benjamin Michael William Jennings Gary Smith Rodney LivingstoneIn the frenzied final years of the Weimar Republic, amid economic collapse and mounting political catastrophe, Walter Benjamin emerged as the most original practicing literary critic and public intellectual in the German-speaking world. Volume 2 of the Selected Writings is now available in paperback in two parts. In Part 1, Benjamin is represented by two of his greatest literary essays, "Surrealism" and "On the Image of Proust," as well as by a long article on Goethe and a generous selection of his wide-ranging commentary for Weimar Germany's newspapers. Part 2 contains, in addition to the important longer essays, "Franz Kafka," "Karl Kraus," and "The Author as Producer," the extended autobiographical meditation "A Berlin Chronicle," and extended discussions of the history of photography and the social situation of the French writer, previously untranslated shorter pieces on such subjects as language and memory, theological criticism and literary history, astrology and the newspaper, and on such influential figures as Paul Valery, Stefan George, Hitler, and Mickey Mouse.
Walter Benjamin's Antifascist Education: From Riddles to Radio
by Tyson E. LewisWalter Benjamin's Antifascist Education is the first comprehensive analysis of educational themes across the entirety of the critical theorist's diverse writings. Starting with Benjamin's early reflections on teaching and learning, Tyson E. Lewis argues that the aesthetic and cultural forms to which Benjamin so often turned—namely, radio broadcasts, children's theatrical productions, collections, cityscapes, public cinemas, and word games—swell with educational potentialities. What emerges from Lewis's reading is a constellational curriculum composed of minor practices such as poor teaching, absentminded learning, and nondurational studying. This curriculum carries political significance, offering an antidote to past and present forms of fascist manipulation, hardness, and coldness. Walter Benjamin's Antifascist Education is a testimony to Benjamin's belief that "everyone is an educator and everyone needs to be educated and everything is education."
Walter Benjamin's Concept of the Image (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Philosophy)
by Alison RossIn this book, Alison Ross engages in a detailed study of Walter Benjamin’s concept of the image, exploring the significant shifts in Benjamin’s approach to the topic over the course of his career. Using Kant’s treatment of the topic of sensuous form in his aesthetics as a comparative reference, Ross argues that Benjamin’s thinking on the image undergoes a major shift between his 1924 essay on ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities,’ and his work on The Arcades Project from 1927 up until his death in 1940. The two periods of Benjamin’s writing share a conception of the image as a potent sensuous force able to provide a frame of existential meaning. In the earlier period this function attracts Benjamin’s critical attention, whereas in the later he mobilises it for revolutionary outcomes. The book gives a critical treatment of the shifting assumptions in Benjamin’s writing about the image that warrant this altered view. It draws on hermeneutic studies of meaning, scholarship in the history of religions and key texts from the modern history of aesthetics to track the reversals and contradictions in the meaning functions that Benjamin attaches to the image in the different periods of his thinking. Above all, it shows the relevance of a critical consideration of Benjamin’s writing on the image for scholarship in visual culture, critical theory, aesthetics and philosophy more broadly.
Walter Benjamin’s First Philosophy: Experience, Ephemerality and Truth (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Philosophy)
by Nathan RossThis book provides a study of Walter Benjamin’s first philosophy in two senses: it focuses on his early philosophy as a source of insight into his later works, and it explores his thinking about the nature of truth, method, experience, the relation of body and mind, and the limits of human knowledge. While most attention is paid to Benjamin’s later works, his writings from roughly 1914-1925 explore philosophical themes and develop a critical method. This book argues that this early work founds a series of original and lasting questions and insights. Benjamin understands experience as a broken continuum of diverse forms of spiritual expression, each of which is ephemeral. This leads Benjamin to a series of thought figures: the notion of language as a medium of experience; a philosophy of perception based in the natural history of the human body; an emphasis on mimesis as a faculty of creative assimilation; and a discovery of memory as a power for excavation of meaning in past experience. This book demonstrates that the need for a new understanding of the metaphysical structure of experience, as well as a new conception of truth, play a special role in shaping Benjamin’s subsequent work. Walter Benjamin’s First Philosophy will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on the thought of Walter Benjamin, 20th-century Continental philosophy, comparative literature, and modern German thought.
Walter Benjamin's Philosophy: Destruction and Experience (Warwick Studies in European Philosophy)
by Andrew Benjamin Peter OsborneThis collection explores, in Adorno's description, `philosophy directed against philosophy'. The essays cover all aspects of Benjamin's writings, from his early work in the philosophy of art and language, through to the concept of history. The experience of time and the destruction of false continuity are identified as the key themes in Benjamin's understanding of history.
Walter Kaufmann: Philosopher, Humanist, Heretic: An Intellectual Life
by Stanley CorngoldThe first complete account of the ideas and writings of a major figure in twentieth-century intellectual lifeWalter Kaufmann (1921–1980) was a charismatic philosopher, critic, translator, and poet who fled Nazi Germany at the age of eighteen, emigrating alone to the United States. He was astonishingly prolific until his untimely death at age fifty-nine, writing some dozen major books, all marked by breathtaking erudition and a provocative essayistic style. He single-handedly rehabilitated Nietzsche’s reputation after World War II and was enormously influential in introducing postwar American readers to existentialism. Until now, no book has examined his intellectual legacy.Stanley Corngold provides the first in-depth study of Kaufmann’s thought, covering all his major works. He shows how Kaufmann speaks to many issues that concern us today, such as the good of philosophy, the effects of religion, the persistence of tragedy, and the crisis of the humanities in an age of technology. Few scholars in modern times can match Kaufmann’s range of interests, from philosophy and literature to intellectual history and comparative religion, from psychology and photography to art and architecture. Corngold provides a heartfelt portrait of a man who, to an extraordinary extent, transfigured his personal experience in the pages of his books.This original study, both appreciative and critical, is the definitive intellectual life of one of the twentieth century’s most engaging yet neglected thinkers. It will introduce Kaufmann to a new generation of readers and serves as a fitting tribute to a scholar’s incomparable libido sciendi, or lust for knowledge.
The Waltz of Reason: The Entanglement of Mathematics and Philosophy
by Karl Sigmund"A mind-bending jaunt ... that makes clear in fascinating detail how math is more than a sum of its parts" (Publishers Weekly) &“Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here,&” Plato warned would-be philosophers. Mathematician Karl Sigmund agrees. In The Waltz of Reason, he shows how mathematics and philosophy together have shaped our understanding of space, chance, logic, cooperation, voting, and the social contract. Sigmund shows how game theory is integral to moral philosophy, how statistics shaped the meaning of reason, and how the search for a logical basis for math leads to deep questions about the nature of truth itself. But this is no dry tome: Sigmund&’s wit and humor shine as brightly as his erudition.The Waltz of Reason is an engrossing history of ideas as vibrant as a ballroom full of dancers, one that empowers as it entertains, following the complex and occasionally dizzying steps of the thinkers who have molded our thought and founded our world.
The Wanderer King
by Theodore Deppe"In these elegant and searing poems, Theodore Deppe gives voice to the full complexity of human character, creating a world that is charged and expansive. With cinematic vividness and stunning eloquence, these poems examine the tensions between hope and despair, responsibility and mystery - as if a sacred universe we were in danger of losing had been stayed at the moment of vanishing. The dramatic monologues are a triumph of the imagination." --Betsy Sholl
Wandering on the Way: Early Taoist Tales and Parables of Chuang Tzu
by Tzu ChuangIn this vivid, contemporary translation, Victor Mair captures the quintessential life and spirit of Chuang Tzu while remaining faithful to the original text.
Wandering Towards a Goal: How Can Mindless Mathematical Laws Give Rise To Aims And Intention? (The Frontiers Collection)
by Anthony Aguirre Brendan Foster Zeeya MeraliThis collection of prize-winning essays addresses the controversial question of how meaning and goals can emerge in a physical world governed by mathematical laws. What are the prerequisites for a system to have goals? What makes a physical process into a signal? Does eliminating the homunculus solve the problem? The three first-prize winners, Larissa Albantakis, Carlo Rovelli and Jochen Szangolies tackle exactly these challenges, while many other aspects (agency, the role of the observer, causality versus teleology, ghosts in the machine etc.) feature in the other award winning contributions. All contributions are accessible to non-specialists.These seventeen stimulating and often entertaining essays are enhanced versions of the prize-winning entries to the FQXi essay competition in 2017.The Foundational Questions Institute, FQXi, catalyzes, supports, and disseminates research on questions at the foundations of physics and cosmology, particularly new frontiers and innovative ideas integral to a deep understanding of reality, but unlikely to be supported by conventional funding sources.
Wang Fuzhi’s Reconstruction of Confucianism: Crisis and Reflection
by Mingran TanWang Fuzhi (1619-1692), a Ming loyalist, was forced to find solutions for both cultural and political crises of his time. In this book Mingran Tan provides a comprehensive review of Wang Fuzhi’s understanding of historical events and his interpretation of the Confucian classics. Tan explains what kind of Confucian system Wang Fuzhi was trying to construct according to his motto, “The Six Classics require me to create something new”. He sought a basis for Confucian values such as filial piety, humanity and ritual propriety from political, moral and cosmological perspectives, arguing that they could cultivate a noble personality, beatify political governance, and improve social and cosmological harmony. This inspired Wang Fuzhi’s attempt to establish a syncretic blend of the three branches of Neo-Confucianism, i.e., Zhu Xi’s (1130-1200) philosophy of principle , Wang Yangming’s (1472-1529) philosophy of mind and Zhang Zai’s (1020-1077) philosophy of qi (material force). The most thorough work on Wang Fuzhi available in English, this study corrects some general misunderstanding of the nature of Wang Fuzhi’s philosophy and helps readers to understand Wang Fuzhi from an organic perspective. Building upon previous scholars’ research on Wang Fuzhi’s notion of moral cultivation, Tan gives a comprehensive understanding of how Wang Fuzhi improves social and cosmological harmony through compliance with Confucian rituals.
The Wannabe Fascists: A Guide to Understanding the Greatest Threat to Democracy
by Federico FinchelsteinMeet today's almost fascists and learn the warning signs to intercept them on the road from populism to dictatorship. With The Wannabe Fascists, historian Federico Finchelstein offers a precise explanation of why Trumpism and similar movements across the world belong to a new political breed, the last outcome of the combined histories of fascism and populism: the wannabe fascists. This new type of populist politician is typically a legally elected leader who, unlike previous populists who were eager to distance themselves from fascism, turns to totalitarian lies, racism, and illegal means to destroy democracy from within. Drawing on almost three decades of research on the histories of fascism and populism around the world, this book lays out in clear language what the author calls the "four pillars of fascism"—xenophobia, propaganda, political violence, and ultimately dictatorship. Finchelstein carefully explains how and why wannabe fascists like Trump, Bolsonaro, and Modi embrace the first three pillars but don't quite succeed in dictatorship and total suppression of the popular vote. The Wannabe Fascists stresses the importance of preventing despots from reaching this tipping point and offers a clear warning for what's at stake.