T. S. Eliot left Harvard during his third year of study in the department of philosophy and went to England. Forty-six years later he authorized the publication of his doctoral dissertation. Here we have a reprint of his sympathetic but not entirely uncritical study of the English idealist philosopher F. H. Bradley.

Nel Medioevo tante volte presentato dalla letteratura come un grande romanzo di avventure, un posto decisamente particolare spetta alla vicenda di Tommaso Becket, prima cancelliere di re Enrico II e poi arcivescovo di Canterbury, assassinato nella sua cattedrale nel 1170. Si tratta di una vicenda che presenta i motivi fondamentali di ogni racconto epico e tragico. Ispirandosi a questa convinzione l’articolo ripercorre alcune delle maggiori opere letterarie che hanno raccontato da diversi punti di vista lo scontro tra Becket e il (...) suo re: alcune delle agiografie medievali, Alfred Tennyson, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer nel XIX secolo, e – nel XX – Thomas Stearns Eliot, Christopher Fry e Jean Anouilh. Del _vero_ Tommaso Becket è assai difficile riuscire a farsi un’idea precisa, mentre sembra realizzarsi la grande metafora, proposta da Giovanni di Salisbury, suo stretto collaboratore, della vita e della storia come rappresentazione teatrale in cui hanno importanza decisiva solo i ruoli che gli uomini sono chiamati a interpretare. _In the Middle Ages, so often depicted in literature as a great adventure novel, a very special place belongs to the story of Thomas Becket, firstly chancellor of King Henry II and later Bishop of Canterbury, murdered in his cathedral in 1170. _ _This episode presents the fundamental motifs of every epic and tragic tale. Inspired by this conviction, this article examines some of the most significant literary works that have described the conflict between Becket and his king from different points of view: some of the medieval hagiographies, Alfred Tennyson, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer in the 19th century, and – in the 20th – Thomas Stearns Eliot, Christopher Fry and Jean Anouilh._ _It is very difficult to get a precise idea of the _real_ Thomas Becket, while the great metaphor proposed by John of Salisbury, his close collaborator, of life and history as a theatrical representation in which only the roles that men are called to play are of decisive importance, seems to have been realized._. (shrink)

Ce recueil réunit des articles qui s'interrogent, depuis un ensemble de perspectives philosophiques des plus diverses, sur le rapport entre nature et éthique.

Written in a highly personal style, Spinoza's "Ethics" presents to readers anordered vision of the universe as a unified whole--not as a lifeless world ofinnumerable separate entities. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Philosophers, novelists, and intercultural comparisons : Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens /​ Richard Rorty Lifeworlds, modernity, and philosophical praxis : race, ethnicity, and critical social theory /​ Lucius Outlaw Modern China and the postmodern West /​ David L. Hall From Marxism to post-Marxism /​ Svetozar Stojanović Incommensurability and otherness revisited /​ Richard J. Bernstein Incommensurability, truth, and the conversation between Confucians and Aritotelians about the virtues /​ Alasdair MacIntyre The commensurability of Indian epistemological theories /​ Karl H. Potter Pluralism, relativism, and (...) interaction between cultures /​ Bimal K. Matilal The problem of relativism /​ Jiang Tianji. Between relativism and fundamentalism : hermeneutics as Europe’s mainstream political and moral tradition /​ Ferenc Feher Conceptual schemes and linguistic relativism in relation to Chinese /​ A.C. Graham The origins of the question : four traditional Japanese philosophies of language /​ Thomas P. Kasulis Meaning as imaging : Prolegomena to a Confucian epistemelogy /​ Roger T. Ames On the dual nature of traditional Chinese thought and its modernization /​ Li Zhilin A planetary macroethics for humankind : the need, the apparent difficulty, and the eventual possibility /​ Karl-Otto Apel Reasonable challenges and preconditions of adjudication /​ Antonio S. Cua The French Revolution and the Holocaust : can ethics be ahistorical? /​ Hilary Putnam Tradition and moral progress /​ Joel J. Kupperman The shape of artistic pasts, East and West /​ Arthur C. Danto. Surrealistic distortion of landscape and the reason of the milieu /​ Megumi Sakabe Why art changes /​ Richard Wollheim The transcendental in a comparative context /​ Frederick J. Streng Reflections on religious pluralism in the Indian context /​ Margaret Chatterjee Three enduring achievements of Islamic philosophy /​ Lenn E. Goodman Two dimensions of religion : reflections based on Indian spiritual experience and philosophical traditions /​ G.C. Pande Between nationalism and nomadism : wondering about the languages of philosophy /​ Graham Parkes The discourse of cultural authenticity : Islamist revivalism and enlightenment universalism /​ Aziz Al-Azmeh Traditional political values and ideas : an examination of their relevance to developments in contemporary African political order /​ Kwame Gyekye On the interpretation of traditional cultures /​ Maria L. Herrera. The concept of progress and cultural identity /​ Roop Rekha Verma Moses, Hsüan-tsang, and history /​ Agnes Heller Secularism : sacred and profane /​ Daya Krishna Scientific progress and content loss /​ Larry Laudan A dialectical view of scientific rationality and progress /​ Marcello Pera Scientific progress reconsidered /​ Ilkka Niiniluoto Does progress in science lead to truth? /​ Lorenz Krüger. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:T. S. Eliot, Dharma Bum:Buddhist Lessons in The Waste LandThomas Michael LeCarnerMany critics have argued that T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land is a poem that attempts to deal with the physical destruction and human atrocities of the First World War, or that he had somehow expressed the disillusionment of a generation. For Eliot, such a characterization was too reductive. He replied, "Nonsense, I may have (...) expressed for them their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form part of my intention." He did not want to be the poet of a "lost generation" of war survivors, but rather, he wanted, like most poets, to write for all ages. To that end, Eliot sought to transcend time and space by bringing to The Waste Land scores of literary, cultural, and artistic allusions from a variety of sources including the Upanishads, Greek mythology, the Bible, Chaucer, Dante, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Leonardo Da Vinci. Ironically, within this menagerie of literary homages, Eliot has created a vast emptiness, a world of pain, suffering, desolation and despair, as if to suggest that even in the presence of all the greatest artistic and cultural achievements of mankind, we must understand that life is transitory and material things ephemeral.The idea that life is fleeting and filled with suffering is at the core of Buddhist thought and one that Eliot surely learned from his graduate studies at Harvard. Several scholars have examined the influence of Eastern philosophy, and in particular Buddhist thought, on Eliot's work, largely in the past forty years.1 My argument departs from this scholarship in two significant ways. First, I will read The Waste Land through the lens of Eliot's graduate studies, and in doing so will show how the poem functions as a didactic, artistic representation of the Buddhist doctrine of samsāra, an idea that views the world as transitory, overcome [End Page 402] with lustful desires, and forever bound to a cycle of life, death, and rebirth. From this perspective, we can see how Eliot's understanding of the original Buddhist texts, which informed much of his writing of The Waste Land, allowed him to see through the all-too-common misconceptions about Buddhism during the early part of the twentieth century. Lastly, we will see that Eliot looked at these misconceptions as a psychological projection of Europeans' discontent with their own lives in an uncertain time.Over the past three decades an increasing number of scholars have studied Eliot's graduate work. In 1985, Jeffrey Perl and Andrew Tuck published a study that examines the impact that Eliot's coursework and professors had on during his studies at Harvard.2 Perl and Tuck point out that Eliot devoted nearly one third of his graduate program to the study of Asian philosophy and philology. Eliot studied Sanskrit and Pali under C. R. Lanman, the preeminent Sanskrit specialist of the age. In his third year, Eliot took a course entitled "Schools of Religious and Philosophical Thought in Japan" with Professor Masaharu Anesaki, a course that had a profound impact on him. Eliot was exposed to several schools of Buddhism in his studies including the Kegon, Shingon, and Tendai, which are characterized as "descendants of the Madhyamika School, which was founded in the second century A.D. by Nāgārjuna, the Indian Buddhist philosopher." Nāgārjuna is widely considered the most influential Buddhist philosopher after Siddhartha Gautama himself and is the leading proponent of the Mādhyamika ("Middle Way") philosophy.The central teaching of Nāgārjuna was the doctrine of śūnyatā, or as it is often translated, "emptiness." For Mahāyāha Buddhists, all things are totally empty of any defining essence. Thus, all things are void of any fixed identity or inherent existence and remain in a constant state of impermanence, change, and flux. This is the fundamental premise of Mahāyāha Buddhism. Only through the realization of this emptiness in material things can one achieve Buddhahood. According to one standard text, "the real knowledge of Buddha nature is empty of empirical content, and it is the discovery of that emptiness or void, śūnyatā, of the true Buddha... (shrink)

On Sept 15, 2008, ‘‘Dark Monday,’’ the world witnessed a radical reshaping of Wall Street. Lehman Brothers fell toward bankruptcy; Merrill Lynch was sold to its rival, Bank of America; and AIG pleaded for $40 billion in government relief. Those calamities marched in step with a dismal parade including the US government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the bailout of Bear Stearns, and the entire subprime debacle. We rightly blame Wall Street leaders for bungling business decisions, for (...) misestimating risk and overloading banks with single-strategy investments. We now are living with the aftermath of these business mistakes. But how about ethical mistakes? Were they, too, part of the crisis? (shrink)

The recently published Cambridge Companion to Spinoza contains a fine essay by Pierre- Francois Moreau on Spinoza’s reception and on his influence during the more than three hundred years that have passed since his death. In Moreau’s twenty-five page article we find a brief paragraph on the novelist George Eliot and half a sentence on Ed Curley. There is not another mention, at all, of any other philosopher from an English-speaking land since the seventeenth century – nothing on how (...) Spinoza’s ideas were received in England, North America or Australia. Not a word on any influence that Spinoza might have had on later thinkers in those countries. (shrink)

This paper is an approach to the context in which Dawson's work originated as well as to the main critiques of the works by Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee and Thomas S. Eliot, with whom he differed on how to address the study of culture. The contrasts between Dawson and the views of these authors are significant and help to refine the concept of culture Dawson used in his philosophy. The paper highlights both Dawson's perspective and what separates or (...) brings him closer to these authors. Conclusions are drawn about the elements Dawson took from each one of them. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Aesthetic Turn: Reading Eliot Deutsch on Comparative PhilosophyJoseph GrangeThe Aesthetic Turn: Reading Eliot Deutsch on Comparative Philosophy. Edited by Roger T. Ames. Chicago: Open Court, 2000. Pp. xiv + 225. Hardcover $42.95.The quality of the eleven contributions to The Aesthetic Turn: Reading Eliot Deutsch on Comparative Philosophy, edited by Roger T. Ames, which celebrates the work of Eliot Deutsch, is one measure of (...) the man. The other is the man himself. It is no exaggeration to say that his efforts as a philosopher and editor of Philosophy East and West helped lay the foundation for the flourishing discipline now called comparative philosophy. In this work, some of the more important philosophers engaged in this worldwide effort comment on particular aspects of Deutsch's philosophy. The results are an exceptional tribute to an exceptional philosopher. Deutsch's responses show an open and gracious intelligence at work, one that is constantly learning from the insights of others.Arthur Danto offers his understanding of the relation between mysticism and art in Deutsch's philosophy. Deutsch's response brings the reader back to the formative years at Columbia University and the still simmering debate over what constitutes a genuine work of art. By revisiting this debate on the ontological status of the modern and the commonplace in a work of art we are provided flashes of insight into Deutsch's understanding of the mystical dimension of "radiant form" as the source of beauty in art. Graham Parkes offers a meditation on the form of the Zen rock garden and thereby prompts an enlightening discussion of the place of the arbitrary and the perfect in aesthetic experience. Essays by J. N. Mohanty and Thomas Kasulis inquire into Deutsch's theory of truth as the real presence of ontological "rightness" and the "fulfillment" of attention. The influence of Advaita Vedānta on Deutsch's thought is nicely brought out as is the continuity of his ideas with other classical European views of truth. Gerald Larson explores the role of the "Tradition Text" in Deutsch's comparative philosophy. Postmodern philosophers could learn from Deutsch's careful handling of historical sources even as he appropriates the moving center of Indian philosophy for his own philosophical projects.One of the most brilliant essays in this festschrift is contributed by Herbert Fingarette. By bringing together the art of "wei wuwei" and the act of suffering, understood as the process of letting be what is really happening, Fingarette restores to suffering its genuine spiritual core. To suffer is not just to suffer pain but rather to "Suffer the Way to be. Do not interfere. Be like water—passive, and yet in the end powerful" (p. 74). Deutsch is moved by this extraordinary essay to offer an exceptional restatement of the central doctrine of the Bhagavad Gītā and his own theory of free action and its relation to authentic art: "This power is compelling for others. It attracts, because it is evident; it calls because one recognizes its possibilities for oneself; it demands because it sets a standard by which one measures, as it were, one's own attainment as a person" (p. 193). The continuing presence of normative [End Page 116] thinking in the pursuit of liberation demonstrates just how serious and well-disciplined is the Asian understanding of moksha. This profound meditation by two wise men is one of the highlights of this book.But Deutsch can also be very tough. The exchange between him and Daya Krishna on the possibility of effective worldly action, given the tenets of the Advaita Vedānta school, offers the spectacle of two very powerful minds struggling with ultimate issues of deep metaphysical concern. Deutsch's response involves careful distinctions to be drawn between concepts such as person, self, and individual. These in turn allow him to paint a very concrete portrait of the acting person as first of all and always a loving being. The continuing relevance of forms of idealistic thinking to a largely secular world is given a robust defense in Deutsch's review of his lifelong efforts to craft a theory of the person as having within its very being the moral, social... (shrink)

Foreward by Pramod K. Nayar -- Prologue -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- The dys-abled players of Samuel Beckett's Endgame -- The circumcised body of Franz Kafka's select letters -- 'Connoisseurship ... of disease' and Thomas Mann's Death in Venice -- 'Undiscovered countries' with Virginia Woolf's On being ill -- 'Connect nothing with nothing' in T.S. Eliot's The wasteland -- Epilogue -- Pathography -- Index.

Montgomery makes a retrospective journey with Walker Percy, as Percy comes to an accommodation with the modern world in company with other companionable journeymen. Percy himself enjoyed a large company of pilgrims who prove amenable to his vision of the human condition - in Percy's words, man is "in a predicament and on the move in a real world of real things, a world which is a sacrament and a mystery," words celebratively spoken of as "the holiness of the ordinary," (...) as opposed to what he called the "losangelization" of the popular spirit, a spirit which increasingly takes refuge in enclaves of "selves" in the relapse into tribalism celebrated as our "New Age." Percy's long journey from and then back to the South, his acceptance of what his Uncle Will exhibited as "Southern stoicism," had a reorientation that proved to be a "fortunate fall" very personal to him, occurring in a world far removed from the Southern Delta culture. He begins to read and read: Gabriel Marcel, Kierkegaard, St. Thomas Aquinas, Camus and Sartre and Eliot and others. And he begins distinguishing between valid science and scientism as knowing of reality, recognized as limited by the finiteness of the intellectual soul. Percy left the field of medicine to doctor to man in a different way. When Percy, recuperating with TB, understands the "holiness of the ordinary," he discovers that this world "is a sacrament," and so requires of him through his gifts a deportment to existence itself in celebration of that sacredness. Thus Percy speaks a manner, not presuming himself the agent of grace through presumption of autonomous intellect, amused and as well regretful that so many about him appear lost in the cosmos. He puts that point to a sympathetic audience, down in Louisiana not far from his comforting "place" in Covington: "Catholic or Protestant, the believing writer is usually unhappy. He feels like Lancelot in search of the Holy Grail who finds himself at the end of his quest at a Tupperware party." But not really unhappy - rather sympathetically regretful that his usual hosts at that party (his possible audience) have lost recognition of the holiness of things that requires the pilgrim intellectual soul a deportment to things in "a sacrament" of consent, before the "mystery" larger than the pretenses of scientism. The world, that is, is not a desert to be plundered to self-comfort as justified by a positivistic apotheosis of the "Self" as a sovereign autonomy desert-bound. The "making" of sacramental piety, whether as novelist or Delta planter, requires the stewardship of love to things in themselves. (shrink)