Transcendentalism is an American literary, political, and philosophical movement of the early nineteenth century, centered around Ralph Waldo Emerson. Other important transcendentalists were Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Amos Bronson Alcott, Frederic Henry Hedge, and Theodore Parker. Stimulated by English and German Romanticism, the Biblical criticism of Herder and Schleiermacher, and the skepticism of Hume, the transcendentalists operated with the sense that a new era was at hand. They were critics of their contemporary society for its unthinking conformity, and urged (...) that each individual find, in Emerson's words, “an original relation to the universe”. Emerson and Thoreau sought this relation in solitude amidst nature, and in their writing. By the 1840s they, along with other transcendentalists, were engaged in the social experiments of Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and Walden; and, by the 1850's in an increasingly urgent critique of American slavery. (shrink)

An American essayist, poet, and popular philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) began his career as a Unitarian minister in Boston, but achieved worldwide fame as a lecturer and the author of such essays as “Self-Reliance,” “History,” “The Over-Soul,” and “Fate.” Drawing on English and German Romanticism, Neoplatonism, Kantianism, and Hinduism, Emerson developed a metaphysics of process, an epistemology of moods, and an “existentialist” ethics of self-improvement. He influenced generations of Americans, from his friend Henry David Thoreau to John Dewey, and (...) in Europe, Friedrich Nietzsche, who takes up such Emersonian themes as power, fate, the uses of poetry and history, and the critique of Christianity. (shrink)

To view a work knowingly gives understanding but not hope Rorty, "The Necessity of Inspired Reading" I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. Thoreau, Walden.

This article explores aspects of eros in education in relation to ideas of indirectness associated with the French concept of pudeur, sometimes translated as ‘modesty’. It explores lines of thought extending through Emerson and Nietzsche but reaching back to Plato's Symposium. This is a means of exposing the ‘impudence’ of some aspects of contemporary education and of pointing towards a conception of eros that is otherwise obscured.

Koopman’s book revolves around the notion of transition, which he proposes is one of the central ideas of the pragmatist tradition but one which had not previously been fully articulated yet nevertheless shapes the pragmatist attitude in philosophy. Transition, according to Koopman, denotes “those temporal structures and historical shapes in virtue of which we get from here to there”. One of the consequences of transitionalism is the understanding of critique and inquiry as historical pro...

The Appreciation of Charles Peirce’s religious dimension has been slow to mature, due in part to the disparate nature of his prodigious output, but also due to a certain blindness of his interpreters. Michael Raposa, in his essay “Peirce and Modern Religious Thought” (1991), argues: “Some early interpreters of Peirce, like Hartshorne and Goudge, argued that his religious perspective was inconsistent with the basic thrust of his philosophy. Many later commentators have implicitly endorsed this argument by systematically ignoring the religious (...) dimension of his thought.” In contrast, Raposa suggests “that what Peirce had to say about religion is remarkably continuous with what he wrote about a variety of .. (shrink)

The starting-point of this article is Graham Richards’ (1995) claim that American psychology includes a moral project present even before the discipline got underway as a modern institution. We accept this, but identify a different kind of moral project, stemming from the radical critique of morality by Ralph Waldo Emerson, rather than the moral aims of Noah Porter and James McCosh. This leads to a morality based on (but not reducible to) psychological events, and worked out, not in academic psychology, (...) but in the practical disciplines of counselling and psychotherapy. We trace its elaboration from Freud to the writings and practice of Albert Ellis and Carl Rogers. The critique is of a traditional morality of obligation with its discourse of ‘shoulds’ and ‘oughts’. A parallel is drawn with a similar (and contemporaneous) critique in moral philosophy. (shrink)

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s status as a canonical figure in American history and literature is firmly established, but there is little agreement on his place within the philosophical canon. The most prominent interpretations classify him as either a “pragmatist” or an “Emersonian moral perfectionist.” Yet, there is no consensus on whether these labels are accurate. I argue for an alternative hermeneutic approach to Emerson. Emerson should be read as a virtue ethicist.

John Kinsella’s twentieth volume of poetry is laden with a poetics of attention to time, water and heat. Climate inheres in simplified topographical sketches, surveys and encounters with animals; water is ambiguous: a solid presence that is also fluid, subject to evaporation and often modelled as multi-dimensional motion; universalised western seasons are used rhetorically and symbolically to bring into relief little seasons within seasons, the more spatially and temporally localised markers of change. All these speak directly to the function of (...) the image and terrestrial matter,and how poetry is alert to such conditions. Kinsella has conceived of this as a “clash between linguistic anomaly and environmental exactness.”. (shrink)

Recent scholarly comment on the relation between Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James offers an either–or choice between conflating the two thinkers in a proto-postmodern, antifoundationalist cast or dividing them into mutually exclusive categories of idealist believer and relativist skeptic. Contending that neither of these positions captures the pragmatist adumbrations in Emerson or the transcendentalist retentions in James, this essay turns to James's annotations of Emerson's writings as a singularly revealing yet largely neglected source of information about the exact nature (...) of the Emerson–James connection. This evidence points to a pluralistic and distinctly literary formulation of intuitive insight as the key for opening up the Emerson–James relation and for framing it with a precision hitherto missing in discussions of these thinkers. The balance of the essay presents an analytic overview of the various aspects and implications of Emerson's and James's ideas of intuition. Combining doubt and belief, skepticism and faith, realism and idealism, a particular formulation of intuition is the answer that Emerson and James both offer to the problem of modernity—the problem of locating a source of value that is both of the self and beyond the self. (shrink)

This paper examines the different conceptions of personal renewal offered in the writings of John Dewey and Stanley Cavell. Both conceptions, I suggest, can be seen as attempting to reconcile the quest for self-realization with democratic life through a poetic, essentially Emersonian vision of the self as a continual work-in-progress. Accordingly, the kinds of selves that Dewey and Cavell seek are in the end highly compatible. Yet it seems clear too that Dewey and Cavell also stand in a somewhat different (...) relation to the Emersonian tradition, and thus diverge in important ways as to the most preferable means of personal renewal. While Dewey tends to focus on the extensive workings of embodied habit, Cavell's ``Emersonian Perfectionism'' takes a more distinctively linguistic turn. After showing the strengths and weaknesses of each approach to personal renewal, I prevail upon the need for educational environments that recognize both the discursive and nondiscursive dimensions of reconstructing the self. (shrink)

Unfortunately, Wittgenstein has entered the philosophical canon , an entrance that has served to reify interpretations of his work. In this essay I refer to recent books by Richard Eldridge (1997) and Phillip Shields (1998) which allow us again to see The Philosophical Investigations as something more than a stultifying relic. Specifically, these authors, by reading Wittgenstein's work not merely as text but also as performance, allow us to enact our own liberating performances of that work. To engage in such (...) enactments of freedom is the essence of philosophical education in the sense established by extra-canonical writers such as Socrates and the Stoics, on the one hand, and Emerson and James, on the other. At least this is so if my use of the work of classicist Pierre Hadot, on the one hand, and brief reference to literary critic Richard Poirier, on the other, is at all successful in illuminating theses from Eldridge and Shields on the nature of Wittgensteinian philosophy. (shrink)