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MAP TO THE END OF TIME

JOURNEYS WITH FRIENDS AND PHILOSOPHERS

At a time when academic philosophy, grown technical and arcane in recent decades, is reaching for a wider audience, this book helps initiate what seems a natural dialogue between the wisdom of ancient texts and the wisdom of advanced years. At age 33 (the “Christological year,” as an older mentor to the secular Jewish writer of this book wryly puts it in the opening pages), Manheimer (Philosophy/Univ. of North Carolina, Asheville) began teaching philosophy to senior citizens and has continued in that line of endeavor up through his now 50-plus years. The author muses on the dialogues he has facilitated between philosophy and the seniors. The book comprises remembered conversations with a sampling of elderly students and friends, reconstructions of classroom and conference discussions, retellings of philosophical classics—from Plato to Augustine to John Stuart Mill—and the author’s own thoughts, both personal and abstract, on the aging process, especially as it affects the experience of time. Though the chapters read as a series of philosophical vignettes—or etudes, to borrow Manheimer’s own metaphor—the book achieves continuity through its centering idea, that the aging process coincides with modernity’s quest to incorporate isolated individuals into larger wholes of meaning. The “map to the end of time” is a picture that matures with age of inter-related lives, each of which draws meaning from its place in relation with the others. Manheimer’s regard for the philosophical classics and his faithfulness to actual, remembered discussions keep his book on course and safely delivered from facile, feel-good conclusions. Indeed, the book refrains from conclusiveness as such, casting its final word as recommendations for further reading. With a little more shaping, this book might have become an equivalent for seniors of the philosophical novel, Sophie’s World, by Joestein Gaarder, which sets philosophy in dialogue with a child. A charming, novelistic reflection on philosophy by a teacher and student of the elderly.

Pub Date: April 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-393-04725-3

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999

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THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS

AND OTHER ESSAYS

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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THE ART OF SOLITUDE

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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