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This book puts recently re-popularized ancient Stoic philosophy in discussion with modern social theory and sociology to consider the relationship between an individual and their environment. Thirteen comparative pairings including Epictetus and Émile Durkheim, Zeno and Pierre Bourdieu, and Marcus Aurelius and George Herbert Mead explore how to position individualism within our socialized existence. Will Johncock believes that by integrating modern perspectives with ancient Stoic philosophies we can question how internally separate from our social environment we ever are. This tandem analysis identifies new orientations for established ideas in Stoicism and social theory about the mind, being present, self-preservation, knowledge, travel, climate change, the body, kinship, gender, education, and emotions.
Winner of the Author's Club Best First Novel Award A Finalist for the East Anglian Book Award for Fiction “The Last Pilot made me cry and brought back all my old Right Stuff feels. A brilliant debut. I loved it.”—Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk Jim Harrison is a test pilot in the United States Air Force, one of the exalted few. He spends his days cheating death in the skies above the Mojave Desert and his nights at his friend Pancho’s bar, often with his wife, Grace. She and Harrison are secretly desperate for a child, and when, unexpectedly, Grace learns that she is pregnant, the two are overjoyed. America becomes swept up in the fervor of the Space Race, while Harrison tur...
An easy, jargon-free introduction to stoicism that covers the full range of stoic thought in a single compact volume Divided into short chapters that can be read in brief sittings, What Is Stoicism? compiles two millennia of Stoic thought into simple conversational prose. This whistle-stop tour of Stoicism covers a surprising number of core topics: • the three pillars of Stoic philosophy: logic, physics, and ethics • the ultimate goal of Stoicism: virtue • the Stoic concept of circles of concern: our individual obligations to our family, community, and world • the Stoic ideal of living in accordance with nature Readers will come to appreciate the vitality of Stoicism and realize how the wisdom of the past can meet the challenges of the present and the future.
Do you believe you think independently? Do you alone control your actions? Stoic philosophy asserts that your mind, thoughts, and actions are traces of a world which shapes you, and everyone else, together. Our personal nature is part of a system, not independent. This book studies how a Stoic thinks and acts as part of a community and in service of a world, rather than separately or for themselves alone. This is not just another book about Stoic philosophy. Stoicism has been popularized as a way to primarily serve personal benefits, promising mental resilience in an uncontrollable world of people and events. This book instead explores how for the Stoics we only benefit personally by being a...
The Ends of Critique re-examines the stakes of critique in the 21st century. In view of increasingly complex socio-political realities and shifts in a fully globalized world, the roles and manners of critique also change. The volume offers an unprecedented re-examination of critique under those conditions of global entanglement and asymmetrical relations from a diversity of scholarly perspectives within the humanities. All contributions move the notion of critique into more diverse traditions than the Eurocentric, Kantian tradition and emphasize the need to attend to a plurality of critical perspectives. The volume’s reflections move critique toward a situated, perspectival, and entangled critical stance, with interventions from decolonial and systemic, deconstructive and (post)human(ist) perspectives. In that way, the volume develops a decidedly different approach to critique than recent considerations of critique as post-critique (Felski) or those endebted to Frankfurt School thought and liberal theories of democracy. It is the first full-length research publication of the interdisciplinary research network Terra Critica.
Putting the New Materialist figure of diffraction to use in a set of readings – in which cultural texts are materially read against their contents and their themes, against their readers or against other texts – this volume proposes a criticalintervention into the practice of reading itself. In this book, reading and reading methodology are probed for their materiality and re-considered as being inevitably suspended between, or diffracted with, both matter and discourse. The history of literary and cultural reading, including poststructuralism and critical theory, is revisited in a new light and opened-up for a future in which the world and reading are no longer regarded as conveniently ...
The gothic, particularly in its contemporary incarnations, is often constructed around largely disembodied concepts such as spectrality or the haunted. Body Gothic offers a counter-narrative that reinstates the importance of viscerality to the gothic mode. It argues that contemporary discourses surrounding our bodies are crucial to our understanding of the social messages in fictional mutilation and of the pleasures we may derive from it. This book considers a number of literary and cinematic movements that have, over the past three decades, purposely turned the body into a meaningful gothic topos. Each chapter in Body Gothic is dedicated to a different corporeal subgenre: splatterpunk, body...
This edited collection builds on recent strands in philosophy that promote a critical conceptual return to the material world outside human culture. Through the lens of literary analysis and theory, it conceptualizes the potential of New Materialism as a timely mode of critique toward the current human condition and its effect on literature and the present. Organized around the key New Materialist concepts of entanglement and speculation, the chapters by renowned literary scholars and theorists approach literary texts and theory from onto-epistemological and speculative realist perspectives. Both concepts critically bespeak our precarious relation to matter during the Anthropocene. Entanglem...
This book provides an interpretative analysis of the notion of spirituality through the lens of contemporary performance and posthuman theories. The book examines five performance/artworks: The Artist is Present (2010) by Marina Abramović; The Deer Shelter Skyscape (2007) by James Turrell; CAT (1998) by Ansuman Biswas; Journey to the Lower World by Marcus Coates (2004); and the work with pollen by Wolfgang Laib. Through the analysis of these works the notion of spirituality is grounded in materiality and embodiment allowing the conceptual juxtaposition of spirit and matter to introduce the paradoxical as the guiding thread of the narrative of the book. Here, the human is interrogated and negotiated with/within a plurality of other living organisms, intangible existences and micro and macrocosmic ecologies. Silence, meditation, shamanic journeys, reciprocal gazing, restraint, and contemplation are analyzed as technologies used to manipulate perception and adventure into the multilayered condition of matter.
The first clear and faithful guide to the timeless, practical teachings of the Stoic philosopher Seneca. Stoicism, the most influential philosophy of the Roman Empire, offers refreshingly modern ways to strengthen our inner character in the face of an unpredictable world. Widely recognized as the most talented and humane writer of the Stoic tradition, Seneca teaches us to live with freedom and purpose. His most enduring work, over a hundred “Letters from a Stoic” written to a close friend, explains how to handle adversity; overcome grief, anxiety, and anger; transform setbacks into opportunities for growth; and recognize the true nature of friendship. In Breakfast with Seneca, philosopher David Fideler mines Seneca’s classic works in a series of focused chapters, clearly explaining Seneca’s ideas without oversimplifying them. Best enjoyed as a daily ritual, like an energizing cup of coffee, Seneca’s wisdom provides us with a steady stream of time-tested advice about the human condition—which, as it turns out, hasn’t changed much over the past two thousand years.