Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P462
ISBN: 9780881464368
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $30.00
This collection of essays and other materials grows from a series of interdisciplinary projects involving more than 150 faculty and a significant number of students from Mercer University’s 11 colleges and schools between 2005 and 2010.
The book explores the relevance to contemporary education of a number of Aristotelian convictions.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P474
ISBN: 9780881464627
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $30.00
In recent decades, many moral philosophers have begun to think more carefully about the significance of our inveterate story-telling habits for moral reflection. For some time those who promoted narrative’s central role for ethics on a variety of levels seemed to be commanding the field; but more recently skeptics of narrative’s relevance have begun to mount a vigorous resistance. Some of these struggles have played out on the terrain of Kierkegaard studies, and this book seeks to move the battle lines forward, both with respect to the significance of narrative more generally and to its place in Kierkegaard’s authorship.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P475
ISBN: 9780881464634
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $30.00
Kierkegaard argued that Christianity is a lived religion, not a set of doctrines to be cognitively affirmed. This means theology’s proper focus is reflection on revelation within the God-human relationship, and human existence—always in process and shaped by different communities, relationships, and contexts—is significant to theological construction. As Christian knowledge is a relationship that cannot be communicated directly, theology is never concluded and cannot adequately function within totalizing systems.
The writings of seventeenth-century Mexican nun, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, provide an exemplary direction for contemporary theologies mindful of this need for indirect communication. Her writings show a respect of others’ cognitive freedom and their differing contexts and perspectives. Utilizing the religious work of this woman from Mexico’s colonial past, Powell builds a theological case for the inclusion of literary genres in the theological discipline, a move that resists western philosophy’s dominance of form and opens the theological canon.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P487
ISBN: 9780881464856
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $24.00
Michel de Montaigne begins his magisterial ESSAIS by telling his readers that he, himself, is the matter of his book. He says that he has written himself so that after death he could remain in the world with those who knew and loved him. Montaigne’s intimate project, meant to be read by friends, has emerged as one of the most surprising and compelling accounts of the human condition ever written.
This volume of essays, based on papers presented at The A.V. Elliott Conference for Great Books and Ideas sponsored by Mercer University’s McDonald Center for America’s Founding Principles, focuses on the outward oriented political philosophy of Montaigne, which is informed by his probing introspection and thoroughly unsentimental self-observation. Contributors include Ann Hartle, Daniel Cullen, Christine Henderson, Eduardo Velasquez, Kevin Honeycutt, and Christopher Edelman.
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Product Code: P492
ISBN: 9780881464993
Price: $35.00
Kierkegaard's writings are severely complicated and readers often do not know what to make of them given the array of genres he deploys. He is at once a philosopher, theologian, literary critic, and poet in his own right who writes under multiple pseudonyms directed at an unsure audience.
Stages on Life's Way is one of his longer and more elusive texts, and even scholars often shy away from it. The Divine Madness of Romantic Ideals offers a close and extensive reading of this puzzling production, showing how its disarming, concrete themes of personal love and marriage help unlock more abstract conceptual boxes within Kierkegaard's authorship for a general readership, pointing out the forest while paying scrupulous attention to the trees.
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Product Code: H891
ISBN: 9780881465020
Price: $35.00
John Updike once wrote that many of his works are "illustrations of Kierkegaard," and yet no current study provides an extended, convincing reason why this is so, why Updike came to live by Søren Kierkegaard's ideas. This study does, telling the story of Updike's life-altering encounter with Fear and Trembling in his early career, and tracing the subsequent evolution of Updike's complex and coherent theology.
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Product Code: P498
ISBN: 9780881465150
Price: $40.00
Among the most important and intricate of all the works of Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety is deeply rooted in the life and personality of its author. First published in 1844 under the cryptic pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis, The Concept of Anxiety is, according to its subtitle, A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Heriditary Sin. "Psychologically orienting" it may be; "simple" it is not. For Kierkegaard, burdened as he was with the guilt of his father, "heriditary sin" was not a theoretical abstraction but an existential reality. Yet the book, born of his daily struggle with anxiety, is perhaps Kierkegaard’s most difficult work, embodying the author's great learning as well as his irony and his passion. In this commentary eight recognized Kierkegaard scholars explore the sources and the continuing influence of The Concept of Anxiety. The Dane's debt to Augustine, Kant, and Schelling, his debate with Hegel and the overarching system of Idealism, and his intellectual legacy to modern thinkers like Martin Heidegger are analyzed and evaluated. The relation of anxiety to freedom and knowledge, to time and eternity, to sin and the demonic is assessed with the care and sensitivity that Kierkegaard's writing demands.
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Product Code: P483
ISBN: 9780881465167
Price: $40.00
In late 1845 Søren Kierkegaard began a literary duel with the satiric Danish review The Corsair that had momentous effects on his life and work. The affair prompted Kierkegaard to ponder and write about the use and abuse of the press. His reflections on this subject led him to examine topics that included communication, the public, the public morale, and the issues of social legitimacy, the relation of the individual to society and, surprisingly enough, the nature of the comic. Standard Kierkegaard biographies and interpretations generally perceive the affair as decisive in leading Kierkegaard to give up his idea of becoming a country pastor and in driving him to continue his prodigious literary output. The Corsair Affair, is not like any other volume previously published or planned in the series. It contains only a few pages of Kierkegaard's own published writings, while his unpublished journals constitute most of the volume. The second-largest section reprints the cartoons and articles about Kierkegaard published in The Corsair and includes excerpts from the autobiography of Meir Goldschmidt, editor of The Corsair. Perkins states in his introduction that this commentary "is the first concerted effort by scholars of many persuasions, using different methods, to address this series of events and the concepts that were developed in and through them. Here we make a fresh new start to work our way through a new set of concepts derived from these documents and our cogitations on them. In the process, we also enrich our treatment of concepts that have long been prominent in Kierkegaard research."
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Product Code: P500
ISBN: 9780881465181
Price: $40.00
Fear and Trembling continues to fascinate and frustrate all who find, for many reasons, that they must struggle with it. Not only 'professional intellectuals,' but students and other seekers perennially wrestle with it, working their way through its difficult dialectic. Both philosophers and theologians are provoked by the prominence of typically Kierkegaardian terms, categories, and arguments—paradox, resignation, faith, the absurd, the individual, the poet, immediacy, the ethical, leap, offence, silence, and others. In Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard challenges many of our modern assumptions, and he will continue to frustrate and fascinate us for so long as we attempt to sort out ourselves and our times. IKC 6 includes the first collection of essays to concentrate the talents of a number of scholars on Kierkegaard's obscure little book Repetition which is, in a word, about hope. Kierkegaard suggests that in the midst of our epistemological errors, the weakness and/or arrogance of our wills, and in making fools of ourselves, or being made fools of, there is everlasting hope for us. Repetition indeed goes to the heart of the matter, to the core of human existence.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P506
ISBN: 9780881465297
Price: $24.00
Adam Smith is best known for his magisterial Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, but his other great work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, is as deserving of serious study. In this volume, scholars in economics, philosophy, and political science take up questions that range throughout Smith’s work, seeking to find connections between his moral theory and political economy. This volume, based on the 2013 A. V. Elliot Conference on Great Books and Ideas at Mercer University, represents a great diversity of disciplinary perspectives. Its authors take up a wide range of concerns that exist in the intersection of Smith’s political and moral theory. It also includes several articles that attempt to compare his work to thinkers that preceded and followed him, coming from as far back in the tradition as the Italian Renaissance, and moving forward in history to claim Smith’s relevance for contemporary research in experimental economics.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P515
ISBN: 9780881465419
Price: $35.00
What does it mean to become a human being? This question was persistently repeated by Kierkegaard scholar Howard V. Hong (1912–2010) to students during his forty-year tenure at St. Olaf College. As one of Dr. Hong’s students, Jamie Lorentzen never forgot the question—one that always pointed to the ethical upbuilding of individuals.
Lorentzen’s Kierkegaard studies inform commentary on how central characters in four works of literature help readers answer Howard Hong’s question.
Twain’s Huck Finn becomes human by being an unwitting ethicist despite himself and the pro-slavery culture in which he was reared. Ishmael and Queequeg’s embrace of the neighbor and outcast in Melville’s Moby-Dick is an ethical counterpoint to Ahab’s terrifying narcissism. Meanwhile, Ibsen’s famous narcissist, Peer Gynt, offers an archetypal negative ethical model for becoming human. Finally, Dostoevsky’s Father Zosima and Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov show how ethics informs human development in both secular and religious cultures.
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Series edited by: Robert L. Perkins
Product Code: P533
ISBN: 9780881465778
Price: $40.00
With the title STAGES ON LIFE'S WAY, Kierkegaard gave a new phrase to many languages and offered through his delineation of aesthetic, ethical, and religious studies a tentative solution to a major conundrum of both modernist and postmodernist sensibility—the question of human identity.
Though the title may suggest a Bildungsroman, the volume is more an arabesque, a collection of apparently separate works followed by a commentary and interpretation of the collection by the editor. The authors of this present collection of previously unpublished essays address, analyze, praise, criticize, and puzzle over the issues of STAGES ON LIFE'S WAY, its relation to the whole of Kierkegaard’s authorship, to Kierkegaard’s own life, and to the difficult task of making sense of our own selves in the various stages on life’s way.
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