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The New Tractatus
Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was informed by the belief that it was possible to get clarity once and for all on fundamental philosophical issues, and so to think our way to a silence where philosophy was no longer necessary. This is The New Tractatus: it sympathizes with Wittgenstein's impatience with the endless cycle of argument, but reacts to this impatience and takes it in different directions than Wittgenstein did. Wittgenstein was concerned with questions like these: What is the meaning of language? What is our relationship to the universe? What is the nature of philosophy? These questions are covered in The New Tractatus, along with many other topics, such as: Why is sex a controversial issue? Why are we so interested in celebrities? What is the nature of love? Why do liberals and conservatives argue about so many things? What is magic? Can miracles occur? Is science objective? Does art lie to us? How do we win arguments? What is the meaning of life? What The New Tractatus shares with the old is the fundamental perception that we can never transcend what is. The world is all that is the case: whatever comes to be is part of the world.
Running is Life
This book is set in many places--Cairo, the Eastern Sierras, Las Vegas, New York's Adirondack Mountains, and Barcelona, among others--but always in the moving body of the runner hurtling both through and into the world. It is a hymn to human motion and an explanation of its sweetness.
What Does ‘Art’ Mean Now?
What Does ‘Art’ Mean Now? asks, and answers, fundamental questions about the nature of aesthetic experience and role of the arts in contemporary society. The Modern Age, Romanticism and beyond, viewed art as something transcending and separated from life, and usually something encountered in museums or classrooms. Nowadays, however, art tends to be defined not by a commonly agreed-upon standard of “quality” or by its forms, such as painting and sculpture, but instead by political and ideological criteria. So how do we connect with the works in museums whose point was precisely that they stood apart from such considerations? Can we and should we be educated to “appreciate” art—a...
The Aesthetic Sense of Life
The Aesthetic Sense of Life is a fast-moving book about how to see the world and get value from living every day with the "everyday." Do the infinite number of sensations we're surrounded with every day have intrinsic value? If not, what gives them value? Who appreciates the sunrise if we don't? Is it enough for just us to appreciate it? Or do we have to share it? The Aesthetic Sense of Life considers and answers to questions such as these in clear, readable prose, offering a way of looking at life that makes clear its value and its meaning. The aesthetic sense of life is neither the viewpoint of the saints--for whom the sensations of the world are mere murmuring and illusion--nor the viewpo...
Disappointment Or the Light of Common Day
In his new work, Disappointment, Bruce Fleming starts from the realization that even objective views of the world are so only under specific circumstances. Subjects range from war and the nature of explanation systems such as science and astrology to a concept Fleming calls "coloring." When we identify coloring, it seems to us that a single quality of something larger has eclipsed all its other qualities--for example, skin color or sexual orientation coming to stand for the whole much more complex individual. Once identified, coloring can be questioned and rejected. However, to eliminate coloring, we must already have identified it as such. Before we perceive coloring, we think we've given a...
Democracy’s Achilles Heel
Democracy’s Achilles Heel argues that the structure of democracy is a combination of two incompatible worldviews: one relativist and liberal, the other absolutist and conservative. This combination of opposites is essential for its survival, yet places democracy at risk since each worldview is prone to trying to engulf the other, creating threats from both the right and the left. This is democracy’s Achilles heel: it never goes away and can only be avoided. The nature of open societies means that absolutisms, for example of a religious kind, can exist quite comfortably within democracy, yet for democracy to succeed, they must permit other belief systems and worldviews, absolute or otherw...
Journey to the Middle of the Forest
What is the taste of life as we really live it, rather than the way we imagine it in others? What does it feel like to become aware of the hand of cards we've been dealt, to play them as well as we can, to understand what has happened to us, and to try to control the future? Journey to the Middle of the Forest answers these questions in a way that celebrity memoirs, where events seem so much more intense than happenings in our own lives because of our perspective and the writer's fame, cannot. In Journey to the Middle of the Forest, Bruce Fleming considers the slippages between presupposition and reality in a life begun and continued in Maryland, with intervals in pre-civil war Rwanda, the w...
Caging the Lion
One of the greatest challenges facing Western society today is that of coming to terms with societies other than our own. "Caging the Lion" summarizes the current contradictions surrounding this challenge, considers the ways in which the West expresses its uneasy relationship with the world outside, and offers some clarity regarding a troubling topic. Fleming suggests that neither the right nor the left is able to solve this problem alone. He proposes that the time has come to put polemics aside in favor of a common-sense approach.
Modernism and Its Discontents
Literary theory of the twentieth century in the Anglo-American tradition forms a coherent whole, dividing into discrete clusters. This theory is riddled with purely logical problems inherent in its enterprise, resulting from the fact that Modernist theory develops as an offshoot of Romanticism. Such fundamental flaws, or discontents, afflict all Modernist theory, from Russian Formalism through Structuralism and Deconstruction. The problems of Modernist theory cannot be solved; at most we can resolve to take theory in a new direction.
What Literary Studies Could Be, and what it is
Taking a literature class in college could be a life-changing experience. Literature can help us give names to feelings and situations that did not have names, allows us to understand what has happened and what is happening to us so we can move forward. Professors can be the coaches in this so-momentous undertaking, guiding, showing, encouraging, challenging. This is a profession we could be proud to belong. Soon, with luck, we might be able to cry: Literary Studies is dead! Long Live Literature!
