Preview: In Jane Campion’s recent film version of Thomas Savage’s Power of the Dog, young Peter comes across his, and his mother’s tormentor, Phil’s secret hiding place. There he discovers in a lean-to the cowboy homophobic Phil’s copies of Physical Culture. As he leafs through the magazines, he sees the famous pictures of Eugen Sandow and his…
Preview: /Review: Agata Bielik-Robson, Another Finitude: Messianic Vitalism and Philosophy (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2019), 312 pages./ Since Nietzsche announced (or prophesied) the death of God, thinkers who took his words seriously have been dealing with one crucial question: how to live a life stripped of any references to transcendent divinity? Are we to mourn…
Preview: /Review: Eli Kramer, Intercultural Modes of Philosophy, Volume One: Principles to Guide Philosophical Community (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2021), 382 pages./ Eli Kramer has provided us with the first volume of an ambitious trilogy entitled Intercultural Modes of Philosophy. His first volume, Principles to Guide Philosophical Community (hereafter PGPC), sets us on a rich, detailed,…
Preview: /Review: Michał Herer, In Praise of Friendship (Alresford, UK: Zero Books, 2021), 112 pages./ In this article I will try to discuss some thoughts presented by Michał Herer in his book In Praise of Friendship. I read it a couple of times and it certainly deserves both the Barbara Skarga prize and interest among young scholars and students…
Preview: /Review: Michael Webb, The Whole at Once: A Conversation on Meaning (Austin,TX: Fire Hill Press, 2020), 244 pages./ This is a book about a phenomenological challenge: to reach the depths of meaning. It relies principally on becoming aware of the self and of the core essence of wholes, be they collections of objects or sentences or ideas. But meaning…
Abstract: Among the themes this article explores are the following: Can philosophy truly help us in times of crisis? What are the distinctive ways in which philosophy can be therapeutic and provide solace? What possible barriers exist to a person being able to be helped by philosophy? What is it to be genuinely open, to ideas, to life? What are the dynamics…
Preview: Beyond Baumgarten, the modern field of aesthetics can be seen as an attempt to go beyond the limits of older philosophies of beauty, sublimity, and taste in order to engage a much wider domain of qualities and judgments relating to our pleasurable and meaningful experiences of art and nature. The defining strategy of Hegelian aesthetics (and other…
Preview: /Review: Jennifer A. Herdt, Forming Humanity: Redeeming the German Bildung Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 312 pages./ Jennifer A. Herdt’s book Forming Humanity: Redeeming the German Bildung Tradition (hereafter FH) traces the post-Kantian secularization of Bildung from its roots in Pietism through its development into the human autocracy of…
Preview: /Review: Steven Collins, Wisdom as a Way of Life: Theravāda Buddhism Reimagined (Columbia University Press, 2020), 304 pages./ Steven Collins was in the process of finalizing his manuscript and final academic work on Buddhism when he passed away unexpectedly at the age of sixty-six in February 2018. Although unfinished, the manuscript was in circulation among his colleagues…
Abstract: Why awaken the soul to justice if the only result can be to increase awareness of the futility of aspiring to justice in the world? Zwicky documents challenges to the belief that teaching philosophy will result in a fairer polity and suggests that perception of being’s integrity sustains pursuit of philosophy as a way of life. DOWNLOAD PDF Keywords:…