Preview: /Review: Poul Andersen, The Paradox of Being: Truth, Identity, and Images in Daoism (Leiden, The Netherlands: Harvard University Asia Center, 2019), 362 pages./ Philosophy tends to approach Daoism in degrees. One may be introduced to the Dao de Jing of Laozi and appreciate the poetic structure and appreciate the virtues of non-coercive action. When one…
Preview: Shusterman, as a philosopher who draws from the work of John Dewey, has pragmatic expectations for art. For Dewey, communing with art was an intensification of experience, that is to say being in the world. For art is full of meaning, and it is in human nature to rush to search for meanings. Experience is only…
Preview: /Review: Marcin Kilanowski, The Rorty-Habermas Debate: Toward Freedom as Responsibility, (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2021), 304 pages./ The American philosopher Richard Rorty (1931 – 2007) and the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) engaged in a lengthy discussion over the years on a range of issues, particularly as these issues involved the…
Preview: /Review: James G. Hart, Hedwig Conrad-Martius’ Ontological Phenomenology, ed. Rodney K.B Parker (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2020), 284 pages./ James Hart is an important phenomenological scholar and thinker who is the author of several books and many articles on Husserl, Husserl’s Utopian Poetics, and the phenomenological movement. This book is Hart’s…
Preview: In various guises and cultures, the theme of elevating, ennobling love is a recurrent topos in the premodern erotic theory my book traces. Freed from Plato’s problematic dualistic denigration of the body as prison of the soul and from the modern aesthetic prejudice of disinterestedness, Ars Erotica recaptures the valuable core of ennobling desire…
Preview: /Commentary: Richard Shusterman, Ars Erotica: Sex and Somaesthetics in the Classical Arts of Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 436 pages./ Richard Shusterman’s work is remarkable, among other things, for extending the range and power of the discipline of aesthetics, conceived by him as fundamental to many dimensions of human experience. Indeed, he has…
Preview: /Commentary: Richard Shusterman, Ars Erotica: Sex and Somaesthetics in the Classical Arts of Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 436 pages./ Richard Shusterman’s Ars Erotica: Sex and Somaesthetics in the Classical Arts of Love is a masterpiece in a number of respects. With its focus on erotic love and the aesthetics of lovemaking, the book…
Preview: /Commentary: Richard Shusterman, Ars Erotica: Sex and Somaesthetics in the Classical Arts of Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 436 pages./ Like other contributors, I would like to begin by expressing my respect and admiration for the scale and scope of Richard Shusterman’s achievement in Ars Erotica. The Preface acknowledges “the vast amount of material”…
Preview: /Commentary: Richard Shusterman, Ars Erotica: Sex and Somaesthetics in the Classical Arts of Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 436 pages./ Richard Shusterman is the not the first scholar in the West who introduces sex and sexuality in the Chinese tradition. Other scholars engaged in this theme include Robert van Gulik, Michel Foucault,…
Preview: /Commentary: Richard Shusterman, Ars Erotica: Sex and Somaesthetics in the Classical Arts of Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 436 pages./ I think “it is official” now. Ars Erotica will become some sort of classic. There are several reasons why. Some (even adult philosophers, as I have seen when Richard Shusterman has spoken…