Overview

A sense of certainty and unhesitating confidence is rare in the contemporary world. An unrelenting flow of choices confronts us at nearly every moment of our lives, and if we are honest about it then most of us will admit that we waver in the face of them. Dreyfus and Kelly examine some of the greatest books in the Western Canon to explain that the burden of choice is essentially a modern problem to which there is an age old solution. Dreyfus and Kelly explain the huge jump from Homer's polytheistic world to the monotheistic one in which Dante wrote his Divine Comedy and Martin Luther wrote his ninety-five theses. They then take the reader forward to the rejection of this Christian ideal, to the Superman of Nietzsche and further onto the spiritual cornucopia of Herman Melville's Moby Dick.Arrivingat the ennui and emptiness that pervades our modern world in which the work of Elizabeth Gilbert and David Foster Wallace arose, Dreyfus and Kelly offer a new-and very old-way to embrace the world, a fresh way to live a meaningful life in a secular world

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9781416596165

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[A]n inspirational book but a highly intelligent and impassioned one. compelling. The Wall Street Journal

Occasionally brave philosophers do leap out of their professional lanes and illuminate things for the wider public. Hubert Dreyfus of Berkeley and Sean Dorrance Kelly of Harvard have just done this with their new book, All Things Shining. They take a smart, sweeping run through the history of Western philosophy. But their book is important for the way it illuminates life today and for the controversial advice it offers on how to live. A rejection of the excessive individualism of the past several decades, the emphasis on maximum spiritual freedom. In this, it's a harbinger of future philosophies to come. --David Brooks, The New York Times

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Author Information

Hubert Dreyfus is a leading interpreter of existential philosophy.  He has taught at UC Berkeley for more than 40 years. Sean Dorrance Kelly is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University.  He is also Co-Chair of Harvard’s interdisciplinary committee for the study of Mind, Brain, and Behavior. Before arriving at Harvard, Kelly taught at Stanford and Princeton, and he was a Visiting Professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. He is considered a leading interpreter of the French and German tradition in phenomenology, as well as a prominent philosopher of mind.  Kelly has published articles in numerous journals and anthologies and has received fellowships or awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEH, the NSF and the James S. McDonnell Foundation, among others.

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