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:…
Preview: “America does not think much of its philosophers,” Douglas Anderson writes in his introduction to Philosophy Americana. “We do not teach philosophy in our high schools. A majority in America have no idea what philosophy is about or why it might be interesting, if not important.” Perhaps that lack of appreciation for philosophy is coeval with its beginnings…
Preview: /Review: Piotr Schollenberger, Jednostkowość i wydarzenie. Studia z estetyki Lyotarda (Warszawa: Semper, 2019), 283 pages./ Piotr Schollenberger’s book entitled Jednostkowość i wydarzenie. Studia z estetyki Lyotarda (Singularity and the Event. Studies in Lyotard’s Aesthetics) is a thorough and extensive – nearly 300-page – philosophical analysis of a number of topics selected from the vast, polyphonic and…
Preview: It has been my observation that Poland is unique for having a philosophy of culture tradition that has theoretical depth and insight into the origins and role of philosophy, popular breadth throughout Polish philosophy in a variety of departments, institutes and programs, and for its cultural relevancy. Yet, this tradition is largely unknown…
Abstract: Popular culture is a vital part of the philosophy of culture. Immersion in the world of popular culture provides an immanent understanding, and after all, some of what is merely popular culture today will be the high culture of tomorrow. The genre of science fiction is one of the more important and durable…
Preview: /Review: Andrea J. Pitts and Mark William Westmoreland, eds. Beyond Bergson: Examining Race and Colonialism Through the Writings of Henri Bergson (New York: State University of New York Press, 2019), 255 pages./ Among Bergson’s contributions to philosophical and empirical investigations; such as those centered on freedom, memory, and evolution; exists in the form…