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Last week in the June 16 New York Times cultural critic Edward Rothstein had an interesting commentary on the New York Botanical Garden drawing on Robert Pogue Harrison's new book, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, to help him place the concept of the garden in the wider context of western history and demonstrate its enduring cultural and historical importance. Rothstein writes:

From medieval cloisters, botanical gardens made their way into universities, beginning with the University of Pisa in 1544. Later the garden's terrain expanded with botanical expeditions, oceanic trade and imperial adventures. Victorian botanical gardens could be encyclopedic in scope, arranging their displays according to Latin classifications of species by the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus.

Now, in our humid, dry, cooled or heated greenhouses, we shun such systematic display. Instead we replicate ecological niches, miniature worlds that supposedly show nature at work: the desert, the rainforest, the tropical pool. But peel back the environmental stagecraft, and the scientific cultivation continues with even greater passion…

There is something moving about the entire enterprise. In a remarkable new book, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, Robert Pogue Harrison (who wrote similar meditations on cemeteries and on forests) elicits some of the meanings that have accumulated around the idea of a garden, from myths, in which the chosen few "can possess the gift of their bodies without paying the price for the body's passions," to places like Versailles, which reflect "an aesthetic drive to tame, and even humiliate, nature into submission." In those royal gardens Mr. Harrison also finds the urge to encompass and incorporate and comprehend: "the militant humanism of the age."

Our age's humanism is much more modest. We are self-effacing to a fault. We don't seem to be taming nature, but to be permitting its full range of expression. We allow it to express multiple perspectives. We don't permit any habitat to dominate, and we defer to the demands of each. We seem to submit to nature. Of course we are creating images of ourselves.

Read the rest of the article online at the NYT website.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

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In the second half of the program Irene Virag, garden columnist at Newsday and a writer for several gardening magazines, joined the discussion.

You may also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Literature | Philosophy
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Jonathan Rosen, editorial director of Nextbook, wrote an appreciative review of Robert Pogue Harrison's Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition for the June 7 edition of the Wall Street Journal. Titled "Paradox Among the Petals," the review begins:

The rabbis of the Talmud counseled that if you are planting a tree and someone tells you that the Messiah has come, you should finish planting your tree and then go out to investigate. Robert Pogue Harrison implies something similar in his rich and beguiling Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. Gardens, though they offer peace and repose, are islands of care, he writes, not a refuge from it. That is why they are important, since care is what makes us human.

This is the third book by Harrison that we have published and each has been a meditation on humanity and the natural world. As a professor of Italian literature, Harrison's work is steeped in classical and modern literature, but as the quote above suggests, he also draws deeply from the religious and philosophical traditions. His previous books include The Dominion of the Dead and Forests: The Shadow of Civilization.

Update June 11: Gardens was also reviewed in today's New York Sun by Eric Ormsby.

You may read an excerpt from Gardens.

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San Francisco Chronicle reporter Susan Fornoff recently talked with Stanford University professor Robert Pogue Harrison about his new book, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. Harrison uses gardens both literally and figuratively for a philosophical exploration from antiquity to the present, showing the connections between horticultural cultivation and the cultivation of the human mind. Fornoff's engaging article appeared today in the Chronicle and discusses gardening, the culture of consumption, and human happiness:

Harrison's … excursion through literature and history revealed a gardening ethic of care that the garden he tends at Stanford University—that of young minds, not plant seedlings—leads him to believe is in some jeopardy.

"This gardening ethic is very much in danger these days, where the emphasis on cultivation has given way to an emphasis on consumption," says Harrison, asserting that a Stanford student would be more inclined to inspect another's backyard on HGTV than to investigate one of the many campus gardens.

"We live in a kind of frenzy of consumerism which forgets that the true source of human happiness is not in the consuming but in the cultivation, in seeing something grow, or caring for something that is not yourself. And I don't know how much we teach the young this ethic of caring for something that is not yourself. Or even caring for things such as an object or a plant. Consumption and cultivation are at war with each other.

If I have any modest expectation for the book, it's just to try to help add to the awareness that consumerism is not a very promising formula for happiness."

The Chronicle article is illustrated with some photos of Kingscote Garden on the grounds of Stanford University, a secret treasure of a garden which Harrison imagines as "the quietly palpitating heart of the university."

Closer to home, Chicago Tribune critic Julia Keller describes herself as "completely besotted" by "this extraordinary, luminous book." Says Keller:

The author has a knack for elucidating complex thoughts with supple skill, so that you never feel lectured to or belittled. His book is sprinkled with references to classic literature, from the Bible to Homer's Odyssey to John Milton's Paradise Lost to Dante's Divine Comedy, but Harrison is such a wonderful teacher that even works you might not know so well go down easy, like the first swallow of chilled lemonade after a hot afternoon spent yanking weeds.

We also have an excerpt from the book.

Archived in History | Literature | Philosophy | Reviews
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Nothing banishes winter's lethargy more quickly than that first sight of the green of spring, as trees bud and our gardens, once again, burst into glorious bloom. For Robert Pogue Harrison, it's not just the depths of winter that gardens help us escape: throughout human history, gardens—both real and imagined—have been essential places of refuge and comfort in the face of a harsh, often violent world.

Employing the richly learned and allusive approach that he brought to his classics, Forests and The Dominion of the Dead, Harrison explores here the central importance of the human urge to nurture and cultivate gardens. Beginning with ancient conceptions of the garden as a place for the quiet work of self-improvement that is crucial to serenity and enlightenment, Harrison then travels widely through the history of Western culture. Enlisting such varied thinkers and writers as Voltaire and Calvino, Boccaccio and Arendt, Harrison profoundly demonstrates the role the garden has long played as a necessary, humanizing check against the degradation and losses of history.

Read the press release.

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Scott McLemee interviewed Neil Gross yesterday for his "Intellectual Affairs" column at Inside Higher Ed. Gross is the author of Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher and he discusses his new book as a work in the sociology of ideas, not just biography and intellectual history. What's the cash value of doing that? Gross explains:

My goal in this book was not simply to write a biography of Rorty, but also to make a theoretical contribution to the sociology of ideas. Surprising as it might sound to some, the leading figures in this area today—to my mind Pierre Bourdieu and Randall Collins—have tended to depict intellectuals as strategic actors who develop their ideas and make career plans and choices with an eye toward accumulating intellectual status and prestige. That kind of depiction naturally raises the ire of those who see intellectual pursuits as more lofty endeavors….

I argue that intellectuals do in fact behave strategically much of the time, but that another important factor influencing their lines of activity is the specific "intellectual self-concept" to which they come to cleave. By this I mean the highly specific narratives of intellectual selfhood that knowledge producers may carry around with them—narratives that characterize them as intellectuals of such and such a type.

In Rorty's case, one of the intellectual self-concepts that came to be terribly important to him was that of a "leftist American patriot." I argue that intellectual self-concepts, thus understood, are important in at least two respects: they may influence the kinds of strategic choices thinkers make (for example, shaping the nature of professional ambition), and they may also directly influence lines of intellectual activity. The growing salience to Rorty of his self-understood identity as a leftist American patriot, for example, was one of the factors that led him back toward pragmatism in the late 1970s and beyond.

Navigate to Insidehighered.com to read the rest of the interview. Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biography | Philosophy | Sociology
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The Chronicle of Higher Education is running an article by James M. Lang on the current state of undergraduate education titled "The Myth of First-Year Enlightenment." In the article Lang cites Tim Clydesdale's recent book, The First Year Out: Understanding American Teens after High School to explore modern students' reactions to their first introduction to academe:

You'll recognize this story: Intelligent but naïve high-school graduate heads off to college… [and] discovers how limited her worldview has been. Her consciousness is awakened. She emerges from her first year of college a changed human being, with more thoughtful views on religion, politics, and her own identity.

Our institutions… hawk the tale to prospective students and their parents on Web sites, in brochures, and on campus tours: You will come back from your first year a changed man or woman. You will be on the path to your new and more enlightened life. You will have had the best four years of your life.

Not so, according to Tim Clydesdale, an associate professor of sociology at the College of New Jersey, and author of The First Year Out: Understanding American Teens After High School.… "Most of the mainstream American teens I spoke with neither liberated themselves intellectually nor broadened themselves socially during their first year out," he writes. "What teens actually focus on during the first year out is this: daily life management."

In other words, freshmen spend most of their time and intellectual energy figuring out how to handle life without parental restraints and support: how to deal with money; negotiate newfound freedoms with sex, drugs, and alcohol; and determine how much time to devote to studying, working, and playing.

But what freshmen don't do during their first year of college comes as more of a (perhaps depressing) surprise: "Most American teens keep core identities in an 'identity lockbox' during their first year out and actively resist efforts to examine their self-understandings through classes or to engage their humanity through institutional efforts such as public lectures, the arts, or social activism."

Read the rest of the article on the Chronicle website.

Archived in Books for the News | Education | Philosophy | Religion | Sociology
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The Chronicle of Higher Education is currently running a great article on Stephen E. Braude and his new book, The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations—a fascinating not to mention entertaining exploration of the paranormal from an academic's point of view. Scott Carlson writes for the Chronicle:

A professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, Braude is a past president of the Parapsychological Association, an organization that gathers academics and others interested in phenomena like ESP and psychokinesis, and he has published a series of books with well-known academic presses on such topics.

His latest, The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations, is sort of a summing up of his career, filled with stories of people who claimed to have otherworldly abilities. The writing is so fluid that the book at times seems made for a screen adaptation. (In fact, Chris Carter, creator of The X-Files, contributes a blurb to the back of the book. Braude advised Carter on a screenplay he is writing.) But Braude also includes some dense philosophical arguments—especially in a chapter about synchronicity, in which he ponders whether humans can orchestrate unlikely coincidences through psychokinesis, the ability to move or influence objects with the mind.

Read the rest of the piece online at the Chronicle website. Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Philosophy | Psychology | Reviews
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Jessica Riskin's Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life was recently given a great review by science fiction writer Greg Bear in Nature. Riskin's book collects seventeen essays from a conference of distinguished scholars in several fields who bring a historical perspective to this most contemporary of scientific topics. And as Bear notes in his review, the result is a particularly comprehensive treatment of the history of artificial life. Bear writes:

The strength of Genesis Redux lies in its scholarship and range of topics. Clockworks, mechanical toys and their influence on biological concepts are presented in fascinating detail. Joan Landes introduces us to the Hoffmanesque works of Jacques de Vaucanson's feminine flautist and (excreting) duck, and to the flayed, preserved and posed cadavers, the écorchés, of Jean-Honoré Fragonard: there is a dancing fetus and a very naked man staring in horror, jawbone in hand. Landes delivers a lively analysis of our reactions to the abject and uncanny, the frisson so beloved by fans of Dr Frankenstein.

The review continues:

Genesis Redux takes the time to shed light on areas I would not naturally consider, and thus enlightens and expands the topic. Its cautious perspective—the enthusiasms of the past considered in the sober light of history—provides a useful counterpoint to [other books on the subject].

See the rest of the article on the Nature website.

Archived in Art and Architecture | History | History and Philosophy of Science | Philosophy | Reviews
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Primatologists Dorothy Cheney and Richard Seyfarth, authors of the new book Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind were featured last week on NPR's Fresh Air to discuss their years of research in Botswana's Okavango Delta observing baboons and their social world. The results of their studies, available in their book, reveal the surprising complexities of baboon society and the fascinating intelligence that underlies it—and indeed may even give us some valuable insights into our own social behaviors. You can listen to archived audio of the interview online at the NPR website or read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Anthropology | Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biology | Philosophy
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Philosophy is perhaps the least visual of all the disciplines, yet as Tamara Chaplin reveals in her new book Turning On the Mind: French Philosophers on Television, by the end of the twentieth century some of the most prominent postwar French philosophers of the day including Bachelard, Badiou, Foucault, Lyotard, and Lévy managed to appear on over 3500 televised programs. In the upcoming edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education Nina C. Ayoub describes one of the more memorable performances detailed in Chaplin's book:

When the psychoanalyst and philosopher Jacques Lacan agreed to appear in 1974 on Un certain regard, he insisted in advance, outrageously, that he would not be addressing everyone, only the "nonidiots." Despite what many viewed as incomprehensible talk—"Was this linguistically tortured charlatanism, or inspired brilliance?," quips Ms. Chaplin—the show was highly entertaining. "You don't really have to understand him to appreciate his satanic humor and to be fascinated by the insolent spectacle. …," France Soir reported. "Lacan beats Jerry Lewis on his own ground," offered Le Figaro. It was good television.

Read the rest of the Chronicle piece on their website.

Archived in Film and Media | History | Philosophy | Reviews
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In a recent edition of the Wall Street Journal, reviewer John Desio delivers an interesting critique of Stephen E. Braude's new book The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations. While Desio, like most, might remain skeptical about the existence of the paranormal he applauds Braude's book for its open minded approach to the subject as it works both to confirm as well as debunk a variety of extraordinary parapsychological phenomena. Desio writes:

The world of the paranormal is such a magnet for hustlers and charlatans that any book on the subject might seem at first like just another attempt to separate the curious or the desperate from their cash. But The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations is not a memoir from "Miss Cleo" of 900-number fame or advice from "cold reading" specialist John Edward on how best to contact your late Aunt Sophie. It is a strange work by Stephen E. Braude, a philosophy professor at the University of Maryland who believes in the existence of paranormal abilities in human beings—but who also, thank goodness, goes out of his way to address the concerns of skeptics and to shoot down fakers who populate the field.

The paranormal, for Mr. Braude, includes the possibility of "postmortem communications" and extrasensory perception, but he is primarily interested in psychokinesis, he writes, because examples of the mind's power over matter is "observable" and "at least potentially easier to document"—and, presumably, to debunk. Mr. Braude does some of both in considering the five case studies that form the heart of The Gold Leaf Lady.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Philosophy | Psychology | Reviews
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Now available in paperback—Optimists believe this is the best of all possible worlds. And pessimists fear that might really be the case. But what is the best of all possible worlds? How do we define it? Is it the world that operates the most efficiently? Or the one in which most people are comfortable and content? Questions such as these have preoccupied philosophers and theologians for ages, but there was a time, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when scientists and mathematicians felt they could provide the answer.

This book is their story. Ivar Ekeland here takes the reader on a journey through scientific attempts to envision the best of all possible worlds. He begins with the French physicist Maupertuis, whose least action principle asserted that everything in nature occurs in the way that requires the least possible action. This idea, Ekeland shows, was a pivotal breakthrough in mathematics, because it was the first expression of the concept of optimization, or the creation of systems that are the most efficient or functional.

Tracing the profound impact of optimization and the unexpected ways in which it has influenced the study of mathematics, biology, economics, and even politics, Ekeland reveals throughout how the idea of optimization has driven some of our greatest intellectual breakthroughs.

Read the press release.

Archived in Economics | History | Mathematics and Physics | Philosophy | Press Releases
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Now available in paperback— The Bourgeois Virtues is a magnum opus offering a radical view: capitalism is good for us. Deirdre McCloskey's sweeping, charming, and humorous survey of ethical thought and economic realities—from Plato to Barbara Ehrenreich—overturns every assumption we have about being bourgeois. Can you be virtuous and bourgeois? Do markets improve ethics? Has capitalism made us better as well as richer? Yes, yes, and yes, argues McCloskey, who takes on centuries of capitalism's critics with astonishing erudition and range of reference. Applying a new tradition of "virtue ethics" to our lives in modern economies, she affirms American capitalism without ignoring its faults and celebrates the bourgeois lives we actually live, without supposing that they must be lives without ethical foundations.

Read the press release.

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Stephen Braude is no stranger to controversy. Braude is a professor of philosophy who has investigated paranormal phenomena for over thirty years. In the preface to his new book, The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations, he relates what happens when a philosopher who has previously limited his research to language, time, and logic turns to investigating parapsychology:

Some philosophers I expected to be open-minded and intellectually honest instead behaved with surprising rigidity and cowardice. I clearly knew the evidence and issues much better than they did, but they condescendingly pretended to know this material well enough to ridicule my interest in it.… I had really thought that as philosophers—as people presumably devoted to the pursuit of wisdom and truth—my colleagues would actually be willing to admit their ignorance and be curious to learn more. I genuinely believed they'd be excited to discover that certain relevant bits of received wisdom might be mistaken.

Fortunately, at least some revelations were more encouraging. Several philosophers whom I thought would be inflexible or disinterested surprised me with their honesty, courage, and open-mindedness. And some reactions I've never fully understood. One famous philosopher (I won't say who) said to me, "Well if someone has to do this I'm glad it's you." I think that was meant as a compliment, but it's obviously open to multiple interpretations.

We posted an excerpt from Braude's book at the beginning of the month and it's been interesting to see those same kinds of reactions played out in the blogosphere:

Jason Kuznicki at Positive Liberty took us to task, opining that "university presses … have certain responsibilities, including above all scientific rigor." (Gosh, thanks for the reminder.) To his credit, though, he engaged with his critics and has perhaps gained a more complete sense of what rigor requires.

One of those critics was Michael Prescott, who posted a defense of the book on his self-named blog. Taking the other side of the issue is biologist P.Z. Myers, blogging on Pharyngula, who for some reason mixes in a discussion of bottled water with his shoot-from-the-hip criticism.

Reading the excerpt from The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations is no substitute for reading the whole book, but it's a place to start. Just don't make up your mind too fast. Braude brings skepticism to his observations of phenomena purported to be paranormal, but he also brings a willingness to put his fundamental scientific beliefs to the test.

Archived in Commentary | Philosophy | Psychology
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This week's Chicago Reader features a front page story titled "Defending Strauss" in which contributor Julie Englander delivers a comprehensive report on the long-running controversy surrounding the former University of Chicago professor of philosophy, Leo Strauss, who died in 1973. As Englander explains, Strauss's name and work have become closely associated with the political practices of some of the neoconservative architects of the war in Iraq, like former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and high-ranking Pentagon official Abram Shulsky, based partly on their association at the University of Chicago. Englander writes:

[The critics argue that] Straussians agreed with their guru, a scholar of Plato, that there are "truths [that] can be comprehended only by a very few, and would be misunderstood by the masses." Thus the "noble lie" (a phrase from Plato's Republic that Strauss liked to use) that [the Bush administration] told the American public: Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, and we've got to go in there, whatever the cost.

But as Englander notes, several writers have recently come to Strauss's aid, arguing that his work has been misinterpreted and misappropriated in the context of America's current political woes:

Figuring enough was enough, in 2006 Michael and Catherine Zuckert published The Truth About Leo Strauss. They described Strauss's encounters with ancient and modern philosophy and pictured him as a skeptic and moderate who had conflicted feelings about modern democracy (as he did about modernism generally) but thought it better than the alternatives. They asked, "Does the Platonic/Straussian doctrine of the noble lie serve to justify the kind of alleged lies critics of Strauss… lay at his doorstep?" They went on, "This is not to say that political leaders do not on occasion do such things, but again, they did not learn to do this from Strauss."

"A lot of stupid and unfair things were said about Strauss," says Michael. "The idea that he had some big political agenda is just nutty."

Yale's Steven Smith concedes in the preface to Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism that Strauss "has always been something of an exotic plant" and is undoubtedly "an acquired taste." But he was "a friend of liberal democracy—one of the best friends democracy has ever had."

To find out more about this thinker and the controversy he stirred up thirty years after his death, read an excerpt from Reading Leo Strauss or read an excerpt from the Zuckert's The Truth about Leo Strauss.

Also be sure to do a quick search on our website to find some of Strauss's own works including Leo Strauss On Plato's Symposium and On Tyranny.

Archived in Commentary | History | Philosophy | Politics and Current Events
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The current issue of the Atlantic Monthly is running a great review of Jeffrey Kripal's new book Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. The review begins by describing Esalen as "equally a phenomenon and an institute" responsible for fostering many of the revolutionary ideas of the 1960s counterculture and playing host to its most notable figures—people like Kerouac, Leary, and Ginsberg, just to name a few. The review goes on to praise Kripal's new book for managing a rather lucid investigation of this counter-cultural hothouse, despite his psychedelic subject matter:

Kripal, a religious-studies professor at Rice University, examines Esalen's extraordinary history and evocatively describes the breech birth of Murphy and Price's [Esalen's founder's] brain child. His real achievement though is effortlessly synthesizing a dizzying array of dissonant phenomena (Cold War espionage, ecstatic religiosity) incongruous pairings (Darwinism, Tantric Sex), and otherwise schizy ephemera (psychedelic drugs, spaceflight) into a cogent, satisfyingly complete narrative. The he reconciles all this while barely batting an eye is remarkable; that he does so while writing with such élan is nothing short of wondrous.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in History | Philosophy | Religion | Reviews
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Barbara Stafford is at the forefront of a growing movement that calls for the humanities to confront the brain's material realities. In Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images she argues that humanists should seize upon the exciting neuroscientific discoveries that are illuminating the underpinnings of cultural objects. In turn, she contends, brain scientists could enrich their investigations of mental activity by incorporating phenomenological considerations—particularly the intricate ways that images focus intentional behavior and allow us to feel thought.

As precise in her discussions of firing neurons as she is about the coordinating dynamics of image making, Stafford locates these major transdisciplinary issues at the intersection of art, science, philosophy, and technology. Ultimately, she makes an impassioned plea for a common purpose—for the acknowledgment that, at the most basic level, these separate projects belong to a single investigation.

Read the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Biology | History and Philosophy of Science | Philosophy | Press Releases
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Eric Santner's new book On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald, recently received an enthusiastic review by Ross Wilson in the Times Literary Supplement. Wilson's review begins:

What is life? What kind of beings are human beings? Despite their forbidding enormity, these questions have received sustained scrutiny in contemporary political theory, philosophy, literary theory, and criticism.… Eric L. Santner's fascinating, difficult book is a significant contribution to this attempt to specify what is human about human life and, indeed, what is meant by "life" to begin with.

Ross not only praises Santner's book as "the most urgently relevant sort of intellectual history" but explains its relation to the work of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, and provides a lucid gloss of its main arguments:

"Creaturely life" is not simple biological life, then, but the "zero degree of social existence"; it is that minimum of human life, closest to animal life, which is caught up in the antagonisms of the political."

Two years ago we posted an essay by Santner that offered a highly topical rehearsal of these ideas—an account of Terry Schiavo and Abu Ghraib as "two faces of the state of exception in which political power takes a direct hold on human life."

As Ross notes in his review, Santner's new book not only extends his earlier work on political theology, but shows how the great novelist W. G. Sebald "in particular, and literature in general, are especially suited to documenting the nature of creaturely life."

Archived in Literature | Philosophy | Reviews
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Monday's San Francisco Chronicle featured an interview with author Jeffrey Kripal on the topic of his new book Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. In his interview with the Chronicle's David Ian Miller, Kripal discusses "Esalen's contributions to the evolution of religion, the state of spirituality today, and the importance of maintaining many paths to enlightenment."

Situated on the edge of the pacific coastline, the Esalen institute has long been a world leader in alternative and experiential education, as well as an influential player in the creation of the American counterculture. Popularized by such luminary figures as Aldus Huxley, Ram Das, and Ansel Adams—all of whom either lived at or visited the institute—Esalen has had a long and fascinating intellectual and spiritual legacy that continues to influence American culture to this day.

To learn more about Esalen and its legacy check out Kripal's interview on the SFGate website. We also have an excerpt from the book.

Kripal was also featured Tuesday, May 22, on KQED radio's Forum with Michael Krasney. Get the audio here.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Philosophy | Religion
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Yesterday's New York Sun features a review of Rémi Brague's new book The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea. Comparing Brague's newest work with his fascinating cultural history of cosmology, The Wisdom of the World, reviewer Adam Kirsch writes:

In The Law of God, Mr. Brague undertakes another journey through the buried continent of the ancient and medieval mind. But his topic this time—the idea of divine law, as it was understood from the ancient Greeks through the Muslim, Christian, and Jewish middle ages—does not seem nearly so remote. Humanity has long conceded that the structure of the inanimate world is the province of science. But most of us continue to believe that the moral law has other, deeper sources. …

That is why The Law of God strikes the reader with more intimate force than The Wisdom of the World. Mr. Brague's earlier book was archaeology, the digging up of something dead and buried; his new one is genealogy, tracing the descent of ideas that are still living. …

Brague's sense of intellectual adventure is what makes his work genuinely exciting to read. The Law of God offers a challenge that anyone concerned with today's religious struggles ought to take up.

Archived in History | Law | Philosophy | Religion | Reviews
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In the May 6 New York Times Book Review, Diane Johnson reviewed Jeffrey Kripal's new book Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. NYTBR also has an excerpt from the first chapter. Johnson recognizes the Esalen Institute's powerful social and political influence as one of the American counterculture's leading centers for alternative and experiential education, as well as its noting its hedonistic reputation:

People of a certain age will remember Esalen, the famous (or infamous) spa in Big Sur on the California coast, founded in the 1960s as a center of the human potential movement. In his book Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, Jeffrey J. Kripal describes it as "a utopian experiment creatively suspended between the revelations of the religions and the democratic, pluralistic and scientific revolutions of modernity." In 1990, someone painted graffiti (unprintable in its entirety here) at the entrance: "Jive … for rich white folk."

Both descriptions are justified, it turns out. It won't escape any reader of this interesting book that almost all the players are good-looking and rich, but we learn that along with the sex and drugs with which it was synonymous, the Esalen Institute, as it was formally known, had considerable intellectual seriousness and was unexpectedly influential in global affairs, with leaders like Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev having some connection. It was Esalen, for example, that beat out the Rockefeller Foundation and the Council on Foreign Relations, among others, to be the sponsors of Boris Yeltsin's 1989 visit to America, during which he experienced his famous conversion to capitalism in a Texas grocery store.

In addition to the material posted in the NYTBR we have our own excerpt from the book: "Totally on Fire: The Experience of Founding Esalen."

Archived in History | Philosophy | Religion | Reviews
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Jeffrey Kripal has an interesting essay in the current Chronicle of Higher Education touching on some of the topics of his new book Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. Among other things, the essay examines the intellectual and spiritual roots of the Esalen Institute—the world-famous center for alternative and experiential education that is the focus of Kripal's book.

Kripal points out that the "secular mysticism" cultivated at the institute is a spiritual trend that can be traced deep in the history of American culture—back to nineteenth-century American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson. According to Kripal, Emerson was a believer in a "democratic, individualized form of spirituality that is fundamentally open to present and future revelations, not just past ones"; a system of belief which the institute's founders, Michael Murphy and Richard Price, also embraced in a "secular mysticism that is deeply conversant with democracy, religious pluralism, and modern science."

The fame of Esalen, however, bloomed in the the 1960s and '70s when Esalen was made one with American popular culture, becoming more sensational than mystic:

People of all ages come from all over the world to learn, heal, explore, chant, dance, drum, massage, and meditate, and many of them eventually find themselves bathing together in outdoor, cliff-top hot tubs in full view of the sea—swimsuits optional. A parade of colorful characters have written, talked, thought, and sang their way through the Esalen story, people like Henry Miller, Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Baez, Fritz Perls, Ida Rolf, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Terence McKenna (a modern-day shaman who advocated the use of psychotropic plants), to name just a few.

But, says Kripal, "Esalen's activist, intellectual, and metaphysical dimensions have struck me as both the most significant and, oddly, the least-known aspects of its story." As a "research laboratory" for the human potential movement, "Esalen played a catalytic role in gestalt and humanistic psychology in the early 60s, educational reform in the late 60s, the embryonic alternative-medicine movement of the early 70s, and the development of citizen diplomacy with the Soviet Union in the late 70s, 80s, and 90s." Esalen, for instance, was a sponsor of Boris Yeltsin's transformative 1989 tour of the United States. The institute has also played an active role in the environmental movement.

And the hot tubs are still there on the cliffs of Big Sur.

To learn more about this fascinating hothouse of contemporary culture read Kripal's full article online at the Chronicle 's Web site, in preparation for the full experience of Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. We also have an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | History | Philosophy | Religion
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The March 21st issue of Publishers Weekly contains an intriguing article by Donna Freitas on Jeffery J. Kripal and his latest work Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. The article leads off with Kripal claiming, "All of my books are about sexuality and sprituality." Freitas goes on to unpack Kripal's alluring statement:

This chair of religious studies at Rice University is explaining why he chose Esalen—the eclectic spiritual retreat in California's Big Sur region—as the subject of six years of research and his most recent book, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion.

Freitas continues:

Kripal said what he discovered there was "an American mysticism that allowed the body and spirit to form a unity of erotic and spiritual energies. At Esalen, the Western religious traditions' rules about a male divine didn't apply anymore. The divine is anything at Esalen. There is no creed. There is no orthodoxy. If anything, it's a pantheistic worldview which opens up hundreds of possibilities for images of divinity… Esalen was born during the civil rights, feminist, and gay rights movements, so it integrated these into its history and intellectual life. All of the battles you see going on today in Western traditions are passé there," he said. "Every tradition has a skeleton in its closet, but at Esalen the skeletons are hanging in the living room and everybody is laughing at them."

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Books for the News | History | Philosophy | Religion
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John Dewey once said that every generation has to accomplish democracy for itself, because social justice is something that cannot be handed down from one person to another: it has to be worked out in terms of the needs, problems, and conditions of the present moment and its distinct challenges. In this impassioned and inspirational work, Eddie S. Glaude Jr. puts Dewey’s idea into the service of his fellow African Americans. According to Glaude, black politics have grown increasingly stagnant and even ineffectual because of their basis in the sufferings and indignities of the past instead of the real-live obstacles of the present moment. To remedy this, Glaude here dislodges black politics from the dogmas and fixed ideas of the Civil Rights movement and points them in the direction of more pragmatic solutions rooted in the here and now. Poor health, alarming rates of imprisonment, drugs, and the advanced concentration of poverty in our nation’s cities warrant a form of political engagement that steps out of the shadows of the black freedom struggles of the 1960s and rises to the complexities of the 21st century with more innovative thinking, a greater emphasis on responsibility and personal accountability, and a fuller embrace of education and participatory democracy.

Heady, provocative, and brimming with practical wisdom, In a Shade of Blue is a remarkable work of political commentary on a scale rarely seen today. To follow its trajectory is to learn how African Americans arrived at this critical moment in their history and to envision where they might head next.

Read the press release. Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Black Studies | Philosophy | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases | Religion
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Situated along the picturesque coastline of Big Sur California, the Esalen institute has long been a world leader in alternative and experiential education—on the cutting edge of everything from Zen to hallucinogenics. Attracting such luminaries as Henry Miller, Joseph Campbell, Aldous Huxley, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Hunter S. Thompson, the institute has had a profound influence on the American counterculture ever since it was first conceived by maverick intellectuals Michael Murphy and Richard Price in the early '60s.

Forthcoming from author Jeffery Kripal, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion is a highly readable and entertaining account of the institute and the unique synthesis of religion, science, and philosophy envisioned by its leaders. Here's an excerpt from an advance review in last month's Publishers Weekly to whet your appetite for Kripal's revealing new look at one of the most important hothouses of America's counterculture:

Many readers will probably not have heard of Esalen—but that doesn't mean they wont find its history fascinating. Kripal, a professor of religious studies at Rice University, tells the story of this beautiful retreat in California's Big Sur region—its history at once sexy, salacious, intellectual, and political—with reverence and playfulness, alternating between the hushed tones of awe and the glee in partaking in Esalen's infamous sinful delights.… Kripal jumps among a wide range of historical moments, from Esalen's alleged relationship to the collapse of the Soviet Union to the idea of the disembodied erotic. Readers shouldn't be scared off by the book's heft. Kripal is an engaging storyteller, Esalen a worthy subject (a kind of US Weekly for the discerning intellectual), and it's as easy to jump from the introduction to chapter 14 as it is to continue in order.

Esalen is currently scheduled for publication in mid April of 2007 and will release in a couple of weeks. We have an excerpt from the book.

Archived in History | Philosophy | Religion | Reviews
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Eddie S. Glaude Jr., author and Princeton University professor of religious studies, was featured on the Tavis Smiley Show last weekend discussing "how his new book, In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America, offers a starting point for examining the upcoming election season through the eyes of African Americans." You can listen to archived audio from the program online at the Tavis Smiley Show website.

With In a Shade of Blue Glaude, one of our nation's rising young African American intellectuals, makes an impassioned plea for black America to address its social problems by recourse to experience and with an eye set on the promise and potential of the future, rather than the fixed ideas and categories of the past. Heady, inspirational, and brimming with practical wisdom, this timely book is a remarkable work of political commentary on a scale rarely seen today. To follow its trajectory is to learn how African Americans arrived at this critical moment in their history and to envision where they might head in the twenty-first century.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Black Studies | Philosophy | Politics and Current Events | Religion | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 03:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A recent review by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas in the February 22 London Review of Books begins by noting the fact that "the dog/human bond, for all its importance, is one of the least examined relationships in Western culture." And indeed, though the attachment between dogs and their human companions plays an important role in the lives of millions of Americans, "dogs have never been considered an appropriate subject for serious scholarship."

Alice Kuzniar's new book Melancholia's Dog: Reflections on Our Animal Kinship promises to change that.

Moving beyond the stereotypes that confine discussion of the dog/human relationships to "lowbrow, popular media and arts," as LRB notes, "this is probably the first time that a scholar of Kuzniar's ability has shown the courage to tackle the deeper aspects of our relationships with dogs."

The review continues:

Our dogs are metaphors for ourselves, something that many of us may have long suspected, but because the idea had never been articulated, or not fully, perhaps we did not appreciate the fact. Or perhaps we didn't want to face it. Thanks to Alice Kuzniar we know it now.

Archived in Philosophy | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 07:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a December 2006 New York Times editorial (which we reprinted online), Mark C. Taylor wrote that his current manner of thinking and teaching "cultivate[s] a faith in doubt that calls into question every certainty." This philosophy is on elegant display in Taylor's newest book, Mystic Bones. By combining images of weathered bones with philosophical aphorisms, Taylor refigures death in a way that allows life to be seen anew. These haunting photographs speak to themes of ruin, mortality, and ritual, and to a theology based on immanence rather than transcendence. At once a fine art book of great originality and a profound spiritual meditation, Mystic Bones is Taylor's most personal statement yet of after-God theology.

See the press release.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Philosophy | Press Releases | Religion
Posted by TXM at 03:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Deirdre McCloskey is no stranger to controversy and her latest work, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce promises to make her the focus of debate once again. An ingenious reply to more than a century's worth of critics whose scorn for the bourgeois lifestyle has become ubiquitous in modern culture, McCloskey's book is nothing less than a wholesale reinterpretation of Western intellectual history; a dead-serious reply to the critics of capitalism that has got the reviewers talking. In an article in the February 4 Chicago Sun Times critic Hedy Weiss remarks:

"To put it in a nutshell: McCloskey is an unabashed fan of the bourgeoisie and the system of capitalism that has led to the creation of the much-maligned class she defines in the broadest terms."

Quoting McCloskey, the article continues:

"The bourgeois life… generates and sustains what I consider to be seven important virtues, including common sense and know-how, courage, temperance or self-command, a sense of justice and fairness to others, and the notion of transformative love. It also can be the source of hope, which I would define as being able to imagine a future goal, and faith, which I see as the source of our identity and our ability to think back to the past."

Countering centuries of assumptions and unexamined thinking, Deirdre McCloskey's The Bourgeois Virtues offers a fascinating reinterpretation of the significance of capitalism in Western society. Read an excerpt. We also have an excerpt from McCloskey's memoir, Crossing.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | History | Philosophy
Posted by TXM at 02:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

John Hyman's newest work, The Objective Eye: Color, Form, and Reality in the Theory of Art, addresses one of the perennial issues in art theory—the fascinatingly complex nature of pictorial representation. Here, Hyman makes a radical departure from recent trends in the philosophy of art to formulate what a review in the January 25 London Review of Books has called a "devastating critique of subjectivism"—all the while using "a complex array of texts and arguments from the full historical sweep of Western cultural reflection on the nature of pictorial art" to build his own "carefully nuanced" objectivist stance.

But though the work of reformulating hundreds of years of theoretical writings in the arts might sound complicated, the London Review continues, "the rigorous clarity and elegant concision of Hyman's writing—literary virtues to which the best analytical philosophy has always aspired—carry his reader through even the most difficult sections. No one will come away from this book without having learned a great deal about one of the most familiar mysteries of human culture."

And indeed, readers will find this an engaging critique of contemporary art theory a fascinating challenge to some of our most fundamental assumptions about the nature of pictorial representation.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Philosophy | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In Real American Ethics: Taking Responsibility for Our Country, Albert Borgmann looks at how we, as ordinary citizens, can take responsibility for our country, from the big concerns to the small and shows how the two are fundamentally connected. Accessible and timely, Borgmann's book goes beyond merely recounting the usual litany of American moral failings to creatively grapple with the effects of our consumer-driven culture—everything from obesity to environmental destruction—and to propose actions we can take to inspire real change. By developing an ethics grounded in our everyday reality we can begin to restructure our lives in a way that's consistent with the distinctive American values of generosity and resourcefulness. Free from ideological dogma and tiresome culture-war finger-pointing, Real American Ethics is a work of refreshing honesty and commitment—required reading for anyone who wants to see America live up to its potential.

Read the press release. Read an excerpt.

Archived in Philosophy | Politics and Current Events | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Joseph Mazur, a professor of mathematics at the University of Marlborough, published a review today of Ivar Ekeland's newest book The Best of all Possible Worlds: Mathematics and Destiny in the international journal of science, Nature. In his review, Mazur praises the book for its fascinating exploration of the work of eighteenth-century French intellectual Maupertuis, a philosopher and physicist whose ideas—as Mazur notes—continue to have a profound impact in both fields to this day. Mazur writes:

The eighteenth-century French philosopher Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis gave us the principle of least action: in all natural phenomena, a quantity called 'action'—for him, the product of mass, distance travelled and velocity—tends to be minimized. In his view, God, being the supreme mathematician, had created the "best of all possible worlds" by insisting that everything in it obey the principle of least action, an economy of effort—a metaphysical rule designed to support the laws of mechanics.

In The Best of All Possible Worlds, Ivar Ekeland skillfully traces the historical developments of de Maupertuis' principle as it matured from a metaphysical directive in physical two- or three-dimensional space to a mathematical principle in a conceptual space where the action is not just minimized but stopped altogether. He then tracks it further to our modern notions of randomness measured by probabilities.

Yet despite its heavy subject matter, Mazur's review continues:

This complex story can be read with a minimum of effort, and we are left feeling that Maupertuis' principle works, even though we know that randomness is hardly compatible with minimizing actions.… [Ekeland's] explanations are clear and elegant, in the brilliant, effortless manner of Richard Feynman, and his prose is fluid, exhilarating and suspenseful. I tried to put this superb book down after chapter 4 but couldn't. It was as if some compelling force of nature had a purpose, an opposing directive in the best of all possible worlds.

Archived in Mathematics and Physics | Philosophy
Posted by TXM at 02:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

John Stuart Mill, a man popularly thought to be responsible for the reformation of Victorian philosophy, is a household name among philosophers. Unfortunately one of his greatest contemporaries is not. William Whewell, a man equally engaged in transforming the philosophical conventions of his era, is often overshadowed by Mill's fame. However, as noted by a recent review in the Times Literary Supplement, Laura J. Snyder's Reforming Philosophy: A Victorian Debate on Science and Society eloquently demonstrates that it was not Mill alone, but rather the dialectic generated by the rivalry of these two great thinkers that was ultimately responsible for the radical transformations in the field of philosophy that took place during the Victorian era. Placing their teachings in their proper intellectual, cultural, and argumentative spheres, Laura Snyder revises the standard views of Victorian philosophy, showing that the concerns of both men remain relevant today.

A rich and nuanced understanding of the intellectual spirit of Victorian Britain, TLS calls Snyder's work "science history at its best." Reforming Philosophy will be welcomed by philosophers and historians of science, scholars of Victorian studies, and students of the history of philosophy and political economy.

Archived in Philosophy | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 03:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today, September 27th, is the anniversary of the death of Walter Benjamin. Widely considered to be one of the most important intellectuals of the twentieth century, Benjamin's work synthesized Marxist philosophy with Jewish mysticism to produce a unique contribution to the fields of philosophy and literary criticism.

The quintessence of a renaissance thinker and outspoken critic of Fascism, Benjamin's work was a powerful response to the totalitarian Nazi regime that plagued his native Germany. Through his writing Benjamin sought to expose the futility of the Fascist belief in historical and political progress by destabilizing the various dogmas underlying it. It was his powerful intellectual condemnation of Fascism that would make him a known target of the Nazi gestapo and eventually lead to his death by suicide on September 27, 1940 in a failed attempt to flee the Vichy regime across the French-Spanish border.

An opponent of the static belief systems that eventually condemned him, he might have appreciated the multitude of philosophical and literary works that have since taken him as their subject and the variety of interpretations each one lends to the significance of his life and death. A most recent and welcomed addition to such works is Michael Taussig's Walter Benjamin's Grave. Through the marvelous essays included in this book, Taussig once again reawakens the inner spirit of Benjamin's finest work, resurrecting the significance of this great thinker for the twenty first century.

We have an excerpt from "Walter Benjamin's Grave", the title essay about the cemetery where Benjamin was buried, eyewitness accounts of his border travails, and the circumstances of his demise.

Archived in Commentary | Literature | Philosophy
Posted by TXM at 11:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The purported links between the political philosophy of Leo Strauss and the neoconservative ideology of the Bush Adminstration has dramatically increased interest in Strauss's work. Yet, as Steven B. Smith argues in his recent book, Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism, this association has done as much to obscure as expose the essence of his thought. Writing in the Times Higher Education Supplement, reviewer John Dunn has given his candid approval of Smith's book for its timely project to dispel such popular misconceptions about the life and work of this fascinating thinker. From the review:

It is interesting to consider how far any thinker is responsible for the ways in which others interpret him; and Strauss himself was often too maddeningly evasive in the ways in which he chose to express himself to escape all responsibility for being widely misunderstood. But whatever he meant to commend, it can scarcely have been the political touch of George Bush with the world beyond the borders of the US. By now, Strauss's teachings have been transmitted through several different academic generations and offered, among many others, to numerous complete idiots and some moderately evil people. They have also traveled far beyond the US, not least to France, Japan and now, unnervingly, to the People's Republic of China. There is everything to be said for Smith's purpose of turning back to the master and attempting to recover just what he really did believe.

Read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Philosophy | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)