_Brings together all of Gadamer's published writings on Celan's poetry, and makes them available in English for the first time. This is accessible commentary on a notoriously difficult poet._.

Stanley Cavell's new book challenges professional philosophers in the United States with his attempt to rehabilitate Emerson and Thoreau as philosophers and to enlarge everyone's vision of the humanities, so that we might keep our eyes on the connections among the disciplines of romanticism, philosophy, and film. Call this eye positioning non-pathological strabismus. From Cavell's viewpoint, professional philosophers keep Emerson and Thoreau out of the philosophical curriculum, because the two are like the Elephant Men of philosophy, oddities that are fine (...) in side-shows like literature departments, but two who would be embarrassments to any philosophers who might claim the two as their own. "Emerson and Thoreau," Cavell says, "are as much threats, or say embarrassments, to what we have learned to call philosophy as they are to what we call religion, as though philosophy had, and has, an interest in its own behalf in looking upon them as amateurs, an interest, I think I might say, in repressing them". Cavell recognizes that he too is an oddity, but perhaps not an oddity who is trying to get even, to exact revenge. This talk of oddness comes from Cavell's essay called "Being Odd, Getting Even: Descartes, Emerson, Poe," one of seven lectures that appears in In Quest of the Ordinary. (shrink)

Compassion is a sign of superficiality: broken destinies and unrelenting misery either make you scream or turn you to stone. Pity is not only inefficient; it is also insulting. And besides, how can you pity another when you yourself suffer ignominiously? Compassion is as common as it is because it does not bind you to anything! Nobody in this world has yet died from another's suffering. And the one who said that he died for us did not die; he was (...) killed. (E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair). (shrink)

This book covers new ground in the English scholarship on Gadamer's work. In Gadamer's Hermeneutics, Joel Weinsheimer gives a detailed reading of Gadamer's major text, Truth and Method, and in Gadamer, Georgia Warnke offers a more general interpretation of Gadamer's work, but neither of these works deals specifically with the early Gadamer, with Gadamer the philologist at work trying to understand Plato and Aristotle.

In this contribution to an exchange of views about “lyric philosophy,” the author argues that the philosopher-poet Jan Zwicky, beginning as early as her dissertation at the University of Toronto, has championed the nonlogical, including the ineffable, the oracular, and the mystical, and that more recently those concerns have merged in a more focused way in her attention to ecological issues. The impulse to fix philosophy and the environment depends in her work mainly on further linguistic statements and declarations, and (...) on occasional overt rejections of traditional political remedies. Thus, the audience for her campaign against analytic philosophy, for example, does not seem to reach beyond the walls of higher education in North America. Zwicky has aligned herself with an esoteric philosophical tradition that has sought to achieve its aims covertly — meaning, for one thing, that it becomes difficult to measure the success of those aims, since they are deliberately meant to be unavailable to public scrutiny. Those aims are not dependent on the general populace's involvement or engagement. Indeed, the author concludes, the general populace has been viewed consistently in the esoteric philosophical tradition as weak and resistant, if not hostile, to philosophical thought. (shrink)