“Glad to the Brink of Fear,” new RWE bio

In "Glad to the Brink of Fear," author James Marcus frames Ralph Waldo Emerson as "as a writer for our times." Read the full review by Anne Pierce Rogers Professor of English emeritus Larry Rosenwald in @nytimes: https://nyti.ms/3IER7YB

https://www.threads.net/@wellesleycollege/post/C5Js944Kc9e/?xmt=AQGztTDdcRccmVHpWl0MA8vkuev_wf_0WjYAbjsFMNYP0Q

Hannah Arendt and the art of beginning afresh: “we are free to change the world”

Hannah Arendt is a creative and complex thinker; she writes about power and terror, war and revolution, exile and love, and, above all, about freedom. Reading her is never just an intellectual exercise, it is an experience.

[…]

She loved the human condition for what it was: terrible, beautiful, perplexing, amazing, and above all, exquisitely precious. And she never stopped believing in a politics that might be true to that condition. Her writing has much to tell us about how we got to this point in our history, about the madness of modern politics and about the awful, empty thoughtlessness of contemporary political violence. But she also teaches that it is when the experience of powerlessness is at its most acute, when history seems at its most bleak, that the determination to think like a human being, creatively, courageously, and complicatedly, matters the most.

She too lived in a "post-truth era," she too watched the fragmentation of reality in a shared world, and she saw with uncommon lucidity that the only path to freedom is the free mind. Whether she was writing about love and how to live with the fundamental fear of loss or about lying in politics, she was always teaching her reader, as Stonebridge observes, not what to think but how to think — a credo culminating in her parting gift to the world: The Life of the Mind...

https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/03/15/we-are-free-to-change-the-world-hannah-arendt/

Thomas Burke

American philosophy is a broad enterprise reaching well beyond the borders of the United States, encompassing a wide range of topics and agendas. But, in my opinion, the distinctive, defining, core contribution of American philosophy to philosophy at large is the classical American pragmatism of Peirce, James, Dewey, and Mead. This school of thought has influenced philosophical discourse all over the world even as we are still trying to figure out what pragmatism is in the first place.

How did you become an American philosopher?

In the late 1980s I was struggling as a graduate student at Stanford to find a dissertation topic. At one point Jon Barwise sent a note to the in-house “situation theory and situation semantics” email list mentioning that during one of his recent talks someone had asked a question concerning possible links to Dewey’s discussions of situations some 50 years earlier. Barwise knew nothing about it and was therefore suggesting it as a possible research topic for anyone who might be interested. I was not particularly interested, but I was struggling. So I took the bait. When I asked him about it, he handed me a copy of Russell’s 1939 review of Dewey’s 1938 Logic. This led me to look at the book itself, and I was hooked. I knew next to nothing about Peirce or James, not to mention Dewey, but I was already primed (via some familiarity with James Gibson’s “ecological psychology”) to jettison modern epistemology in favor of something, anything, that was oriented to a more dynamic interactive conception of ourselves as living things who happen to be able to think...

(continues)