A glossary explains the relatively few philosophical terms Klein sprinkles in this warm, winsome book of eclectic musings.
A miscellany of concise advice about life.
Like many people in their 20s, Klein (Travels with Epicurus: A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilled Life, 2014, etc.) asked himself some age-old questions: what is the meaning of life? How does one live a good life? He sought answers from his readings as a Harvard undergraduate and later as a graduate student in philosophy, jotting down salient quotations in a notebook he called “Pithies.” Now, 40 years later, the author offers an expanded collection “of concise philosophical precepts” along with candid personal reflections on each. Among his many sources of inspiration are Pascal and Epicurus, David Hume and John Stuart Mill, William James and Albert Camus. But Klein finds wisdom from such popular sages as Woody Allen, John Barth, and Walker Percy and from contemporary philosophers, such as Oxford-trained “techno-hedonist” David Pearce and analytic moral philosopher Derek Parfit. Klein cites Albert Einstein’s praise of solitude (“delicious in the years of maturity”) and Emerson on “the blessings of old friends,” and he admits that ethicist Peter Singer makes him feel “bad about not being good.” Moral philosophy, writes the author, “with its abstract arguments about the principles of right and wrong, is not really that relevant to our lives” but “may only be a luxury for those of us who do not need to struggle simply to stay alive.” He reveals that he's had past bouts of depression and times when he felt overwhelmed “by the meaninglessness of it all,” but he never lost his conviction that life is worth living. As an agnostic, he agrees with atheist Sam Harris’ “crucial distinction between religion and mysticism.” Mysticism, as Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “wonders not how the world is but that the world is.”
A glossary explains the relatively few philosophical terms Klein sprinkles in this warm, winsome book of eclectic musings.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-14-312679-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
The name of C.S. Lewis will no doubt attract many readers to this volume, for he has won a splendid reputation by his brilliant writing. These sermons, however, are so abstruse, so involved and so dull that few of those who pick up the volume will finish it. There is none of the satire of the Screw Tape Letters, none of the practicality of some of his later radio addresses, none of the directness of some of his earlier theological books.
Pub Date: June 15, 1949
ISBN: 0060653205
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1949
A fine thematic introduction to gnosticism, concentrating on the texts discovered at Nag Hammadi (Upper Egypt) in 1945. Pagels teaches the history of religion at Barnard, and she has spent practically all of her young academic life working with the Nag Hammadi manuscripts in one way or another. She brings her considerable competence to bear on the subject without overwhelming the reader with scholarly minutiae. Pagels sees in gnosticism a "powerful alternative to. . . orthodox Christian tradition," an alternative she clearly finds attractive. Gnostics treated Christ's resurrection as a symbolic rather than a corporeal event. They rejected the authoritarian, bishop-dominated structure of the orthodox church. They looked beyond the masculine imagery of the patriarchal God to various concepts of a feminine or bisexual divinity. They avoided the excesses of the martyrdom cult and its apotheosis of the suffering Jesus. In surprisingly modern fashion, they cultivated a religion that stressed personal enlightenment over corporate belonging, insisting that "the psyche bears within itself the potential for liberation or destruction." These and other gnostic tenets were repressed by mainstream Christianity because, Pagels claims, they constituted a political threat to the hierarchy. In the calmer, freer atmosphere of contemporary Christianity, they can better be appreciated for their intrinsic richness. Pagels' advocacy of gnosticism is restrained and responsible—she admits, for example, that its elitist, intellectualist qualities made it ill-suited as a faith for the masses—but this partisanship, plus the absence of solid explanation of the movement's historical roots, may create a misleading picture of it as a sort of heroic prototype of liberal Protestantism. Otherwise a clear, reliable, richly documented guide.
Pub Date: Nov. 26, 1979
ISBN: 0394502787
Page Count: 229
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1979
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