by Magdalena Lovejoy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 27, 2018
A captivating take on Plato’s account of the soul.
A reconsideration of Plato finds within his work an articulation of Taoist enlightenment.
According to debut author Lovejoy, the objective of human life is the achievement of oneness with God. This “communion with the Divine” is a state of enlightenment. That condition of enlightenment is also one of transcendence in which the true self, unsullied by conceptual pollution and metaphorical obfuscation, reveals itself. And the false self, the unconscious presentation of dualistic thinking, is finally overcome. In the work of Plato, the author discovers the development of a strikingly similar notion, expressed in terms of a “Fourfold Path,” which tracks the soul’s ascent from ignorance to self-realization. That progression is chronicled in the famous divided line analogy, in which human intellect is viewed as a movement through four successive stages: imagination, belief, thought, and intuitive understanding. In Lovejoy’s philosophically vibrant interpretation, Plato sees the substance of the cosmos as a “world soul,” the “original unified substance that is in and through all things.” But the self, understood as an individuated object apart from the world, develops over time largely through the employment of spatial metaphors, which encourage the equation of the soul with the body. Moving beyond the realm of conceptual demarcation—the false self sketched by spatial metaphors—leads one back to the original oneness. As a result, the true self is no longer sundered from God. The author’s exegesis is remarkably inventive, and she rigorously defends her claims with close textual readings of primary works. Lovejoy’s prose can be academically convoluted, but it’s never impenetrable, and always repays the effort. But her translations of the Greek can be unconventional; for example, she renders “phronesis” as reason, which is overly broad and seems less precise than the more typical practical judgment. In addition, her interpretations are peculiarly apolitical—Plato presents these allegories and analogies in the context of an extended discussion of justice and the nature of the best regime.
A captivating take on Plato’s account of the soul.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5320-5017-6
Page Count: 284
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Albert Camus ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 1955
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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by Stephen Batchelor ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 18, 2020
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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