A Happy Bastille Day to one and all! France’s national holiday is a day for celebrating its people as a collective force to be reckoned with. Specifically, it remembers those who came together to storm the Bastille in Paris on July 14, 1789. More generally, however, it celebrates the forging
Follow @yaleSCIbooks When Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence he would never have imagined a country where agriculture was not always a respected activity in society. In American Georgics: Writing on Farming, Culture and the Land, editors Edwin C. Hagenstein, Sara M. Gregg, and Brian Donahue explore the history
Richard Dawkins famously argues that religion is “the root of all evil,” leading inevitably to intolerance, violence, and worse. Yet in Abraham’s Children: Liberty and Tolerance in an Age of Religious Conflict, the collection’s editor Kelly James Clark sets himself firmly against such arguments. “How does one determine,” Clark asks,
For Terry Eagleton, writing is “exploratory.” “The act of writing is both a great delight to me in itself,” he explained in a recent interview on London’s Yale Books Blog, but it “also is constitutive of my thought.” As the author of more than forty books, which span the fields
Famously cited as one of Obama’s favorite philosophers, midcentury religious and political thinker Reinhold Niebuhr offered “a political realism that refuses to abandon high moral principles to short-term practical compromises.” In Why Niebuhr Matters, from Yale University Press’s Why X Matters Series, author Charles Lemert explores the continued relevance of
Follow @yaleSCIbooks How are you? It’s a question we are constantly asking—on the sidewalk, over the copier, at the dinner table. Almost invariably the answer is noncommittal. “Fine.” “Okay.” “I’m doing well.” What about “happy”? Happiness is hard to talk about—not least because we have so many definitions of what
Following the success of The Craftsman, the renowned Richard Sennett further explores craft in Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation, addressing how we can create a better society by learning to truly listen and cooperate with others, even when our interests are conflicting. Salon.com ran an excerpt from
With heavy hearts and minds, we said good-bye to Elisabeth Young-Bruehl at the beginning of December, who, over her career as a psychoanalyst, writer, biographer, and philosopher, contributed immensely to our understanding of humanity and modern social conscience. In the Chronicle Review, Peter Monaghan wrote a poignant tribute to her
An excerpt from Nigel Warburton’s A Little History of Philosophy, a lively and accessible introduction to Western philosophy, bringing the ideas of the world’s greatest thinkers into focus. from Socrates’ questions about reality to Peter Singer’s thinking on the moral status of animals in our own times. Nigel Warburton— You
Defining a Change: Literary Theory, Truth, and Fiction in the Digital Age
Terry Eagleton’s newest book The Event of Literature addresses literary theory and tackles the question—what is literature—utilizing a variety of theories. Each theory has its own historical perspective that is formed by morals, values, and events. It is this ever-changing standard used to define literature that Eagleton grapples with in
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