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The Correspondence of Boris Pasternak and Olga Freidenberg, 1910-1954
Letters exchanged between Pasternak and his cousin chronicle their personal lives and the suffering of Russia during the Stalin era.
A Case for Conservatism
In his recent book Against Liberalism, philosopher John Kekes argued that liberalism as a political system is doomed to failure by its internal inconsistencies. In this companion volume, he makes a compelling case for conservatism as the best alternative. His is the first systematic description and defense of the basic assumptions underlying conservative thought.Conservatism, Kekes maintains, is concerned with the political arrangements that enable members of a society to live good lives. These political arrangements are based on skepticism about ideologies, pluralism about values, traditionalism about institutions, and pessimism about human perfectibility. The political morality of conserva...
The Art of Life
"That the art of life is creative, imaginative, and individual does not mean... that it cannot be taught and learned or that individuals cannot improve their mastery of it. Teaching it proceeds by way of exemplary lives, and learning it consists in coming to appreciate what makes some lives exemplary.... That imitation here is impossible does not mean one cannot learn from examples. The question is, How can that be done reasonably; how can decisions about how one should live escape being arbitrary, if they are left to individual creativity and imagination and are not governed by rules that apply to everyone living in a particular context?"—from The Art of LifeThe art of life, according to ...
The Illusions of Egalitarianism
In this systematic and scathing attack on the dominant contemporary version of liberalism, John Kekes challenges political assumptions shared by the majority of people in Western societies. Egalitarianism, as it's widely known, holds that a government ought to treat all citizens with equal consideration. Kekes charges that belief in egalitarianism rests on illusions that prevent people from facing unpleasant truths.Kekes, a major voice in modern political thought, argues that differences among human beings in the areas of morality, reasonability, legality, and citizenship are too important for governance to ignore. In a rigorous criticism of prominent egalitarian thinkers, including Dworkin,...
Image and Concept
First published in 1997. Image and Concept: Mythopoetic Roots of Literature here - finally - available in English, is devoted to the origins of Greek tragedy. In it, Freidenberg develops the notion that it was the very transition from thinking based on mythological images to the kind of thinking that makes use of formal-logical concepts that resulted in the appearance of literature. With the transition from mythological thinking to conceptual thought, the content of mythological images became the texture of the new concepts. The inherited mythological forms now were reinterpreted conceptually: causalized, ethicized, generalized, abstracted. This reinterpretation, in turn, brought about poetic figurality. Folkloric material began to be differentiated from the mythological images of the past into various disciplines such as religion, philosophy, ethics, literature, and art. Yet, differentiated and reinterpreted as it was, the folkloric material remained formally preserved in poetic image, structure, and plot.
Forms of Modernity
It's a critical cliché that Cervantes' Don Quixote is the first modern novel, but this distinction raises two fundamental questions. First, how does one define a novel? And second, what is the relationship between this genre and understandings of modernity? In Forms of Modernity, Rachel Schmidt examines how seminal theorists and philosophers have wrestled with the status of Cervantes' masterpiece as an 'exemplary novel', in turn contributing to the emergence of key concepts within genre theory. Schmidt's discussion covers the views of well-known thinkers such as Friedrich Schlegel, José Ortega y Gasset, and Mikhail Bakhtin, but also the pivotal contributions of philosophers such as Hermann Cohen and Miguel de Unamuno. These theorists' examinations of Cervantes's fictional knight errant character point to an ever-shifting boundary between the real and the virtual. Drawing from both intellectual and literary history, Forms of Modernity richly explores the development of the categories and theories that we use today to analyze and understand novels.
The Pragmatic Perspective
This volume contains a selection of reviewed and revised papers, originally presented at the International Pragmatics Conference held in Viareggio, Italy, 1 5 September 1985.
Russian and West European Women, 1860-1939
This ambitious study provides a sweeping overview of the position of women in England, France, Germany, and Russia/USSR from 1860-1939. The book illustrates their struggles to realize their dreams and their resourcefulness in coping with often dreary, hard, even horrifying lives. Deftly combining statistical data to underscore collective experiences and belles lettres to highlight the texture of individual women's lives, the book assesses the significance of gender, class, nationality, and religion. This richly researched work traces common patterns and unique experiences in women's lives by showing how they defined themselves, coped with daily life, and confronted disaster with courage and resourcefulness.
Facing Evil
Arguing that the prevalence of evil presents a fundamental problem for our secular sensibility, John Kekes develops a conception of character-morality as a response. He shows that the main sources of evil are habitual, unchosen actions produced by our character defects and that we can increase our control over the evil we cause by cultivating a reflective temper.
