Description
Temporarily out of stock
Title: American Philosophy: A Love Story
Author: KAAG JOHN
Illustrator: SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY AND SUGGESTED READING, INDEX
Format: HARDCOVER
Publication date: 08/11/2016
Imprint: FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX
Price: $37.00
Publishing status: Active
In <i><b>American Philosophy</b></i>, John Kaag – a disillusioned philosopher at sea in his marriage and career – stumbles upon a treasure trove of rare books on an old estate in the hinterlands of New Hampshire that once belonged to the Harvard philosopher William Ernest Hocking. The library includes notes from Whitman, inscriptions from Frost, and first editions of Hobbes, Descartes, and Kant. As he begins to catalog and preserve these priceless books, Kaag rediscovers the very tenets of American philosophy – self-reliance, pragmatism, the transcendent – and sees them in a twenty-first-century context.
Hocking was one of the last true giants of American philosophy. After studying under Harvard's Philosophical Four – William James, George Santayana, Josiah Royce, and George Herbert Palmer – he held the most prestigious chair at the university for the first three decades of the twentieth century. And when his teachers eventually died, he collected the great books from their libraries (filled with marginalia) and combined them with his own rare volumes at his family's estate. And there they remained for nearly eighty years, a time capsule of American thought.
Part intellectual history, part memoir, <i><b>American Philosophy</b></i> is an invigorating investigation of American pragmatism and the wisdom that underlies a meaningful life.
ISBN: 9780374154486
Weight: 300gr
Dimension: 208mm X 135mm
Pages: 272