At the Existentialist Cafe - Sarah Bakewell

With the charming Montaigne at its center, Bakewell’s How to Live was an instant crowd-pleaser. Now the one-time “suburban teenage existentialist” presents a more challenging cast, including Heidegger, Merleou-Ponty, Camus, Sartre, and Beauvoir. Aside from Heidegger, about whom “a single documented example” exists of his “actually doing something nice,” Bakewell not only admires, but truly likes her subjects; her profiles are as engaging as they are illuminating. Noting that “all existentialism is applied existentialism,” Bakewell traces the philosophy’s role in feminism, gay rights, and other movements—work sure to continue as technology and neuroscience force us to reconsider the definition of “human.”

The Manhattan Project: A Theory of a City - David Kishik

What it Walter Benjamin didn’t die in 1940 but lived on in New York, writing a sequel to his Arcades Project, a study of Gotham called The Manhattan Project? David Kishik’s commentary on this lost book is a brilliantly realized thought experiment that’s as full of wit and imagination as it is of serious thoughts about Benjamin, urban development, graffiti, homelessness, public spaces (one extraordinary chapter locates New York’s Public Library “at the epicenter of the twentieth-century world”) with side trips into the history of photography and hoarding. As likely to quote Frank Sinatra as he is Jane Jacobs, Kishik draws on thinkers including Arendt and Spinoza, visual artists ranging from Weegee to Arbus to Warhol. If this sounds like Walter B. meets Woody Allen—it is: the transcript of their 1985 conversation starts on page 204.

The Manhattan Project: A Theory of a City By David Kishik Cover Image
$35.00
ISBN: 9780804786034
Availability: Not On Our Shelves—Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: Stanford University Press - March 11th, 2015

The Manhattan Project: A Theory of a City By David Kishik Cover Image
$22.00
ISBN: 9781503602779
Availability: Not On Our Shelves—Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: Stanford University Press - March 14th, 2017

A Significant Life - Todd May

What makes a life worth living? Which values and accomplishments should count, and how do we decide? Once, God and a cosmic order determined meaning. Now, personal happiness seems to be measure. In this conversational discussion, Todd May talks through the possibilities for A Significant Life, none of which is entirely satisfactory. What if God’s values, for instance, turn out to be so different from ours that they’re inhuman? What if someone is deeply devoted to and fulfilled by her pet goldfish? Is this a meaningful life? While starting with Camus and Aristotle, May doesn’t recite abstruse arguments but draws examples from real lives we’re familiar with. The intense life of Jimi Hendrix; meaningful? What about the similarly driven Lance Armstrong? We many not find a fixed, universal standard for meaning but May shows that meaning surely exists.

A Significant Life: Human Meaning in a Silent Universe By Todd May Cover Image
$18.00
ISBN: 9780226421049
Availability: Special Order—Subject to Availability
Published: University of Chicago Press - August 24th, 2016

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