by Mark Rowlands ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 8, 2009
Supercilious at times and misanthropic throughout, but Rowlands offers an accessible, intriguing way to engage complex...
A unique human-animal friendship becomes the springboard and locus for exploring issues in metaphysics, ethics, existentialism, theodicy and human emotion.
Through philosophical reflections combined with a personal narrative of the ten-plus year period he lived with a wolf named Brenin, Rowlands (Philosophy/Univ. of Miami, Body Language, 2006, etc.) constructs both a memoir and a philosophical journal. Each chapter is packed with personal anecdotes—for example, the author and friends picking up girls at rugby parties with Brenin’s “help”—and with philosophical explorations ranging from notions of time, consciousness and freedom to ideas regarding malice, evil and death. Rowlands also investigates humankind’s supposed obsession with feelings and sets out to redefine, or at least re-envision, such emotions as happiness, love and pleasure. His knowledge of the Western philosophical tradition is rich, ranging from Aristotle through Hobbes, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Sartre. The author’s presentation of difficult philosophical concepts and of more general human experience is keen and readable, though his insights are often profoundly misanthropic. The narrative is alternately humorous and affecting, even self-deprecating at times, but the tone can also be arrogant, self-indulgent and self-aggrandizing. This creates an odd and largely duplicitous kind of irony, since Rowlands’ primary impulse seems to be an attempt to reveal the depravity of human nature. Wolf and canine qualities are privileged throughout the text, albeit in compelling and convincing ways. The author learns from Brenin, for example, that “in happiness, pleasant and unpleasant aspects form an indissoluble whole.” The wolf is the real teacher in this relationship.
Supercilious at times and misanthropic throughout, but Rowlands offers an accessible, intriguing way to engage complex philosophical ideas.Pub Date: April 8, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-60598-033-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
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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 Albert Camus ; translated by Justin O'Brien & Sandra Smith
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by Albert Camus ; translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy & Justin O'Brien
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by Albert Camus translated by Arthur Goldhammer edited by Alice Kaplan
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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