If Robin Lane Fox writes a book, I buy it. I have never been disappointed.
I regularly teach the "Iliad." So, reading Fox’s new book about Homer and the "Iliad" feels like a long conversation about a dear friend. He explores and answers “the questions where, how and when . . . [the "Iliad"] is likely to have been composed.” His answer is that Homer was an oral poet, part of a long tradition of oral poets, but he was also the single illiterate author of the intricate and beautiful story that we now call the "Iliad." He comes to this conclusion as part of a literary, historical, and archeology investigation that is part scholarships, part mystery, and part love affair.
A thrilling study of the greatest of all epic poems, by one of the world's leading classicists
Homer's Iliad is the famous epic poem set among the tales of Troy. Its subject is the anger of the hero Achilles and its dreadful consequences for the warring Greeks and Trojans. It was composed more than 2,600 years ago, but still transfixes us with its tale of loss and battle, love and revenge, guided throughout by the active presence of the gods. Its beauty and profound bleakness are intensely moving but great questions remain: where, how and when it was composed and…
How was Europe populated? And from where? And what were the mechanisms for and the means of this population?
Jean Manco describes the archeology and history of the populating of Europe from the Upper Paleolithic to the violent movements of the Vikings at the end of the first millennium AD. She writes a detective story in which archaeology, culture, language, history, and the physical environment are framed relative to the study of DNA in populations.
Even though her history ends with the Vikings, the story she tells implicates us within the broader matrix of human history. The book is an adventure in thought and analysis.
Who are the Europeans? Where did they come from? In recent years scientific advances have yielded a mass of new data, turning cherished ideas upside down. The idea of migration in prehistory, so long out of favour, is back on the agenda. Visions of continuity now have to give way to a more dynamic view of Europe's past, with one wave of migration followed by another, from the first human arrivals to the Vikings. This pioneering book brings together for the first time the latest genetic evidence and combines it with archaeology and linguistics to produce a new history of…
Richard Rorty was a colleague of mine at Stanford. We argued more than we ever agreed. While these arguments could be frustratingly inconclusive, I have read this year with great joy his posthumously published book.
He writes with his usual wit and clarity, but the book is also breathtakingly fearless. I have a number of disagreements with his arguments and conclusions, but that is not the point. He is thinking through his commitments and articulating these commitments within a broad philosophical vision.
It is a book that exemplifies thinking and, in so doing, reminds us of what philosophy can be.
The last book by the eminent American philosopher and public intellectual Richard Rorty, providing the definitive statement of his mature philosophical and political views.
Richard Rorty's Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism is a last statement by one of America's foremost philosophers. Here Rorty offers his culminating thoughts on the influential version of pragmatism he began to articulate decades ago in his groundbreaking Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.
Marking a new stage in the evolution of his thought, Rorty's final masterwork identifies anti-authoritarianism as the principal impulse and virtue of pragmatism. Anti-authoritarianism, on this view, means acknowledging that our cultural inheritance is…
In my book, I demonstrate that Elizabeth Bennet and her creator are misunderstood, and often unrecognized, geniuses of moral philosophy, but not simply because of their virtue or wit or natural skills in game theory.
The engine driving the moral judgment and growth of Austen’s protagonists consists of a particular and not well-understood ability to reason by description, a skill we moderns must recover and remaster in order to negotiate the complexities of contemporary life.
The forms of rational description this book derives from Austen will be of great interest not only to literary critics and theorists but also to philosophers and anyone interested in ethics, the dynamics of power, and practical reasoning. It is a literary analysis, a philosophical argument, and a practical guide to ethical thinking.
