Download or read book The Philosophy of Autobiography written by Christopher Cowley and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-10-26 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book promises to be the first of its kind: a philosophical investigation of autobiographical writing. All of us are autobiographers at least some of the time, and all of us crave certain kinds of recognition and confirmation from others, just as we fear blame and reproach from those who know us well. The philosophy of autobiography examines this fundamental story-telling process and its place in our lives. As such it straddles a number of long-standing philosophical questions, having to do with the meaning of life, the problems of autonomy and responsibility and authenticity, the nature of self-deception and bad faith, the structure of the self and its existence through time, the question of the reliability and meaning of memory, and the problem of understanding another person and imaginatively identifying with him. The contributors to the volume are mostly philosophers, but many of them have interests outside philosophy and have been informed by research findings from literary theory and from psychiatry. Some of the contributors are also literary theorists, and one of them has even published autobiographical work. Contributors also examine specific autobiographies and diaries, of philosophers and non-philosophers, as well as fictional works using an autobiographical format, in order to explore the philosophical implications and presuppositions of the genre. The result is a most useful and productive interdisciplinary exchange."

Download or read book A Philosophy of Autobiography written by Aakash Singh Rathore and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2018-10-09 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers intimate readings of a diverse range of global autobiographical literature with an emphasis on the (re)presentation of the physical body. The twelve texts discussed here include philosophical autobiography (Nietzsche), autobiographies of self-experimentation (Gandhi, Mishima, Warhol), literary autobiography (Hemingway, Das) as well as other genres of autobiography, including the graphic novel (Spiegelman, Satrapi), as also documentations of tragedy and injustice and subsequent spiritual overcoming (Ambedkar, Pawar, Angelou, Wiesel). In exploring different literary forms and orientations of the autobiographies, the work remains constantly attuned to the physical body, a focus generally absent from literary criticism and philosophy or study of leading historical personages, with the exception of patches within phenomenological philosophy and feminism. The book delves into how the authors treated here deal with the flesh through their autobiographical writing and in what way they embody the essential relationship between flesh, spirit and word. It analyses some seminal texts such as Ecce Homo, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Waiting for a Visa, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, A Moveable Feast, Night, Baluta, My Story, Sun and Steel, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, MAUS and Persepolis. Lucid, bold and authoritative, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of philosophy, literature, gender studies, political philosophy, media and popular culture, social exclusion, and race and discrimination studies.

Download or read book Philosophy and Autobiography written by Christopher Hamilton and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-11-13 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, taking its point of departure from Stanley Cavell’s claim that philosophy and autobiography are dimensions of each other, aims to explore some of the relations between these forms of reflection, first by seeking to develop an outline of a philosophy of autobiography, and then by exploring the issue from the side of five autobiographical works. Christopher Hamilton argues in the volume that there are good reasons for thinking that philosophical texts can be considered autobiographical, and then turns to discuss the autobiographies of Walter Benjamin, Peter Weiss, Jean-Paul Sartre, George Orwell, Edmund Gosse and Albert Camus. In discussing these works, Hamilton explores how they put into question certain received understandings of what philosophical texts suppose themselves to be doing, and also how they themselves constitute philosophical explorations of certain key issues, e.g. the self, death, religious and ethical consciousness, sensuality, the body. Throughout, there is an exploration of the ways in which autobiographies help us in thinking about self-knowledge and knowledge of others. A final chapter raises some issues concerning the fact that the five autobiographies discussed here are all texts dealing with childhood.

Download or read book The Autobiography of Philosophy written by Michael Davis and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the most important book about the nature of philosophy and of the human soul published this year. In making the condition for its own possibility its deepest concern, philosophy is necessarily about itself_it is autobiographical. The first part of The Autobiography of Philosophy interprets Heidegger's Being and Time, Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals, Aristotle's Metaphysics, and Plato's Lysis as examples of the implicitly autobiographical character of philosophy. The second part is a reading of Rousseau's The Reveries of the Solitary Walker. Although Rousseau's explicitly autobiographical writings are more often read for the tantalizing details of his rather eccentric life than for their philosophical import, this work is an artful use of Rousseau's exile and isolation_'the strangest position in which a mortal could ever find himself'_as a paradigm for the human soul in its relation to the world. In powerfully articulating the activity that is at the core of all philosophy, The Reveries articulates the nature of the human soul for which this activity is the defining possibility.

Download or read book Augustine s Confessions written by William E. Mann and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eight new essays examine key philosophical issues raised by Augustine in his 'Confessions' - a masterpiece of world literature. They explore a range of topics including what constitutes the happy or blessed life, the role of philosophical perplexity in the search for truth, and the problems that arise in the attempt to understand minds.

Download or read book Artful Truths written by Helena de Bres and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-09-10 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a philosophical perspective on the nature and value of writing a memoir. Artful Truths offers a concise guide to the fundamental philosophical questions that arise when writing a literary work about your own life. Bringing a philosopher’s perspective to a general audience, Helena de Bres addresses what a memoir is, how the genre relates to fiction, memoirists’ responsibilities to their readers and subjects, and the question of why to write a memoir at all. Along the way, she delves into a wide range of philosophical issues, including the nature of the self, the limits of knowledge, the idea of truth, the obligations of friendship, the relationship between morality and art, and the question of what makes a life meaningful. Written in a clear and conversational style, it offers a resource for those who write, teach, and study memoirs, as well as those who love to read them. With a combination of literary and philosophical knowledge, de Bres takes the many challenges directed at memoirists seriously, while ultimately standing in defense of a genre that, for all its perplexities—and maybe partly because of them—continually proves to be both beloved and valuable.

Download or read book A Pitch of Philosophy written by Stanley CAVELL and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an invitation to the life of philosophy in the United States, as Emerson once lived it and as Stanley Cavell now lives it--in all its topographical ambiguity. Cavell talks about his vocation in connection with what he calls voice--the tone of philosophy--and his right to take that tone, and to describe an anecdotal journey toward the discovery of his own voice.

Download or read book The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico written by Giambattista Vico and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-15 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico is significant both as a source of insight into the influences on the eighteenth-century philosopher's intellectual development and as one of the earliest and most sophisticated examples of philosophical autobiography. Referring to himself in the third person, Vico records the course of his life and the influence that various thinkers had on the development of concepts central to his mature work. Beyond its relevance to the development of the New Science, the Autobiography is also of interest for the light it sheds on Italian culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Still regarded by many as the best English-language translation of this classic work, the Cornell edition was widely lauded when first published in 1944. Wrote the Saturday Review of Literature: "Here was something new in the art of self-revelation. Vico wrote of his childhood, the psychological influences to which he was subjected, the social conditions under which he grew up and received an education and evolved his own way of thinking. It was so outstanding a piece of work that it was held up as a model, which it still is."

Download or read book God written by Jerry Martin and published by . This book was released on 2016-03-17 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The voice announced, "I am God." For Jerry Martin, that encounter began a personal, intellectual, and spiritual adventure. He had not believed in God. He was a philosopher, trained to be skeptical-- to doubt everything. So his first question was: Is this really God talking? There were other urgent questions: What will my wife think? Why would God want to talk to me? Does God want me to do something? He began asking all the questions about life and death and ultimate things to which he--and all of us--have sought answers: Love and loss. Happiness and suffering. Good and evil. Death and the afterlife. The world's religions. The ways God communicates with us. How to live in harmony with God. God: An Autobiography tells the story of these mind-opening conversations with God.Jerry L. Martin was raised in a Christian home. By the time he left college, he was not a believer. But he was interested in the big questions and so he studied the great thinkers. He became a philosophy professor and served as head of the philosophy department at the University of Colorado at Boulder and of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In addition to scholarly articles on epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and public policy, he wrote reports on education that received national attention and was invited to testify before Congress. He stepped down from that career to write this book.

Download or read book The Autobiography Effect written by Dennis Schep and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-24 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the advent of post-structuralism, various authors have problematized the modern conception of autobiography by questioning the status of authorship and interrogating the relation between language and reality. Yet even after making autobiography into a theoretical problem, many of these authors ended up writing about themselves. This paradox stands at the center of this wide-ranging study of the form and function of autobiography in the work of authors who have distanced themselves from its modern instantiation. Discussing Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous and others, this book grapples with the question of what it means to write the self when the self is understood as an effect of writing. Combining close reading, intellectual history and literary theory, The Autobiography Effect traces how precisely its theoretically problematic nature made autobiography into a central scene for the negotiation of philosophical positions and anxieties after structuralism.

Download or read book The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon written by Solomon Maimon and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first complete and annotated English translation of Maimon's influential and delightfully entertaining memoir. Solomon Maimon's autobiography has delighted readers for more than two hundred years, from Goethe, Schiller, and George Eliot to Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt. The American poet and critic Adam Kirsch has named it one of the most crucial Jewish books of modern times. Here is the first complete and annotated English edition of this enduring and lively work. Born into a down-on-its-luck provincial Jewish family in 1753, Maimon quickly distinguished himself as a prodigy in learning. Even as a young child, he chafed at the constraints of his Talmudic education and rabbinical training. He recounts how he sought stimulation in the Hasidic community and among students of the Kabbalah--and offers rare and often wickedly funny accounts of both. After a series of picaresque misadventures, Maimon reached Berlin, where he became part of the city's famed Jewish Enlightenment and achieved the philosophical education he so desperately wanted, winning acclaim for being the "sharpest" of Kant's critics, as Kant himself described him. This new edition restores text cut from the abridged 1888 translation by J. Clark Murray, which has long been the only available English edition. Paul Reitter's translation is brilliantly sensitive to the subtleties of Maimon's prose while providing a fluid rendering that contemporary readers will enjoy, and is accompanied by an introduction and notes by Yitzhak Melamed and Abraham Socher that give invaluable insights into Maimon and his extraordinary life. The book also features an afterword by Gideon Freudenthal that provides an authoritative overview of Maimon's contribution to modern philosophy.

Download or read book Derrida and Autobiography written by Robert Smith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-06 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The work of Jacques Derrida can be seen to reinvent most theories. In this book Robert Smith offers both a reading of the philosophy of Derrida and an investigation of current theories of autobiography. Smith argues that for Derrida autobiography is not so much subjective self-revelation as relation to the other, not so much a general condition of thought as a general condition of writing - what Derrida calls the 'autobiography of the writing' - which mocks any self-centred finitude of living and dying. In this context, and using literary-critical, philosophical, and psychoanalytical sources, Smith thinks through Derrida's texts in a new, but distinctly Derridean, way, and finds new perspectives to analyse the work of classical writers including Hegel, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Freud, and de Man.

Download or read book Autobiography at Fifty written by Mou Zongsan and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2015-08-02 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China and the world entered a period of social, political, intellectual, and cultural crisis at the turn of the twentieth century, with China, being on the weak side of the China-world linkage, swept into calamitous turmoil. As this crisis intensified in the late 1920's, an innocent boy from rural China went to Beijing, where disruptive forces feeding the tumult converged, to attend pre-college classes at Peking University. In the ensuing thirty years, with wars torching the land around him, through personal suffering and struggles, he observed, learned, reflected, and lived to develop himself into a serious philosopher. This philosopher will later become arguably the most important Chinese philosopher of the twentieth century. This autobiography recounts the philosopher's development against the social and political events and intellectual currents of the turbulent time. It weaves social-political commentaries and philosophical contemplations in a narration of personal experiences. While movingly recalling the bright side of life-the worry-free childhood in a tranquil farm village, the unconditional friendship in difficult times, the uplifting inspiration from a teacher with authentic character, the soul-soaking awakening by a remote chant heard in a quiet night-it also honestly reveals the less bright side of living a life-the pull of the world of the senses, the self-righteous rancor harbored against those who wronged him, the anger and irreverence directed at certain well known figures, the dejection that overtook him when the world around him crumbled. But above all it shares with readers a genuine, unending existential quest. The philosopher's vigilance for "being" leads him to exclaim: "Just let the feeling of nothingness ... float without any lingering resistance! ... Have nothing, only this suffering, only this fear, only this sadness!" Vigilance for "being" is vigilance in solitude. The deepening of nothingness turns into absolute commiseration-the commiserative enlightenment that unifies the subjective and the objective sides of reality into one. With his own religiosity engaged by this deep existential enlightenment, the philosopher in the final chapter leaves the account of his factual life behind and turns to philosophizing "commiseration" by way of evaluating Christianity and Buddhism, infusing the autobiography with a distinct philosophical flavor. In this philosophical evaluation, what he finds lacking in Christianity and Buddhism in terms of commiserative enlightenment, he finds in Confucianism. This autobiography thus marks the launch of the philosopher into thirty more years of philosophizing about Confucianism, and underscores the importance of existential experience in motivating his very original Confucian moral metaphysics.

Download or read book The Philosophy of Hilary Putnam written by Randall E. Auxier and published by Open Court. This book was released on 2015-05-18 with total page 975 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hilary Putnam, who turned 88 in 2014, is one of the world’s greatest living philosophers. He currently holds the position of Cogan University Professor Emeritus of Harvard. He has been called “one of the 20th century’s true philosophic giants” (by Malcolm Thorndike Nicholson in Prospect magazine in 2013). He has been very influential in several different areas of philosophy: philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science. This volume in the prestigious Library of Living Philosophers series contains 26 chapters original to this work, each written by a well-known philosopher, including the late Richard Rorty and the late Michael Dummett. The volume also includes Putnam’s reply to each of the 26 critical and descriptive essays, which cover the broad range of Putnam’s thought. They are organized thematically into the following parts: Philosophy and Mathematics, Logic and Language, Knowing and Being, Philosophy of Practice, and Elements of Pragmatism. Readers will also appreciate the extensive Intellectual Autobiography.

Download or read book Philosopher of the Heart written by Clare Carlisle and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosopher of the Heart is the groundbreaking biography of renowned existentialist Søren Kierkegaard’s life and creativity, and a searching exploration of how to be a human being in the world. Søren Kierkegaard is one of the most passionate and challenging of all modern philosophers, and is often regarded as the founder of existentialism. Over about a decade in the 1840s and 1850s, writings poured from his pen pursuing the question of existence—how to be a human being in the world?—while exploring the possibilities of Christianity and confronting the failures of its institutional manifestation around him. Much of his creativity sprang from his relationship with the young woman whom he promised to marry, then left to devote himself to writing, a relationship which remained decisive for the rest of his life. He deliberately lived in the swim of human life in Copenhagen, but alone, and died exhausted in 1855 at the age of 42, bequeathing his remarkable writings to his erstwhile fiancée. Clare Carlisle’s innovative and moving biography writes Kierkegaard’s life as far as possible from his own perspective, to convey what it was like actually being this Socrates of Christendom—as he put it, living life forwards yet only understanding it backwards.

Download or read book Confessions of a Philosopher written by Bryan Magee and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 1999-05-18 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this infectiously exciting book, Bryan Magee tells the story of his own discovery of philosophy and not only makes it come alive but shows its relevance to daily life. Magee is the Carl Sagan of philosophy, the great popularizer of the subject, and author of a major new introductory history, The Story of Philosophy. Confessions follows the course of Magee's life, exploring philosophers and ideas as he himself encountered them, introducing all the great figures and their ideas, from the pre-Socratics to Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper, including Wittgenstein, Kant, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer, rationalism, utilitarianism, empiricism, and existentialism.

Download or read book Schopenhauer written by David E. Cartwright and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-29 with total page 601 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first comprehensive biography of Schopenhauer written in English. Placing him in his historical and philosophical contexts, David E. Cartwright tells the story of Schopenhauer's life to convey the full range of his philosophy. He offers a fully documented portrait in which he explores Schopenhauer's fractured family life, his early formative influences, his critical loyalty to Kant, his personal interactions with Fichte and Goethe, his ambivalent relationship to Schelling, his contempt for Hegel, his struggle to make his philosophy known, and his reaction to his late-arriving fame.