First philosophy: reality, truth, and knowledge -- The universe in brief -- Ontology -- Theory of truth -- Epistemology -- Axiology: goodness, beauty, and liberty -- Values as situations -- Ethics -- Aesthetics -- Political philosophy.

Passionate and rollicking personal and intellectual essays by philosopher Crispin Sartwell. Philosopher, music critic, and syndicated columnist Crispin Sartwell has forged a distinctive and fiercely original identity over the years as a cultural commentator. In books about anarchism, art and politics, Native American and African American thought and culture, Eastern spirituality, and American transcendentalism, Sartwell has relentlessly insisted on an ethos rooted in unadorned honesty with oneself and a healthy skepticism of others. This volume of (...) selected popular writings combines music and art criticism with personal memoir about addiction and rebellion, as well as cultural commentary on race, sexuality, cynicism, and the meaning of life. “Crispin Sartwell deserves to be recognized as the heir to a distinctively American intellectual legacy. Like the American ‘cynics’ he loves—Twain, Bierce, Mencken—he is fiercely individualistic, deeply antiauthoritarian, and slavishly aligned with no creed or academic discipline. He uses his significant erudition not to escape the ordinary or himself, but rather to let loose riches—of insight, suffering, and beauty—through a relentless examination of life, culture, and reality. Sartwell is also, in my opinion, the best philosophical prose stylist of his generation. His writing—crystalline, vivid, and intoxicating—is an uncontrollable substance. And though Sartwell swaggers, provokes, and sometimes infuriates, he does so with a tacit humility and self-scrutiny, which empowers readers to follow his example and convert their own rage into beauty.” — Elizabeth Walden, Bryant University “Crispin Sartwell is the most important philosophical voice of his generation. He has risen into the public consciousness in the last two decades due to his controversial views on social, political, and cultural subjects. Through television appearances, journalism, and blogging, along with his numerous scholarly books, he has made a reputation as a thinker of serious thoughts. Yet, there is a lightness to his world that is irreverent, fun, and entertaining. These essays reflect some of his best writing from the past fifteen years. They are highly readable, but they are also profound reflections on the subjects that will draw many of us into deeper ponderings about the meaning of life, or, more to the point, the meaning of our lives.” — Randall Auxier, author of Time, Will, and Purpose: Living Ideas from the Philosophy of Josiah Royce. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Exclusions Community and Meaning Beyond Semiotics Limits of Communitarianism.

This ambitious philosophical anthology combines analyses and surveys of contemporary theorising on social identity.

This is a multicultural philosophy of art applied to common American and European experience and discussed in relation to Taoist, Buddhist, Hindu, Native American, and African traditions.

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but it's also in the language we use and everywhere in the world around us. In this elegant, witty, and ultimately profound meditation on what is beautiful, Crispin Sartwell begins with six words from six different cultures - ancient Greek's 'to kalon', the Japanese idea of 'wabi-sabi', Hebrew's 'yapha', the Navajo concept 'hozho', Sanskrit 'sundara', and our own English-language 'beauty'. Each word becomes a door onto another way of thinking (...) about, and looking at, what is beautiful in the world, and in our lives. In Sartwell's hands these six names of beauty - and there could be thousands more - are revealed as simple and profound ideas about our world and our selves. (shrink)

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Leni Riefenstahl meets Charlie Chaplin : aesthetics of the Third Reich -- Artphilosophical themes -- Dead Kennedys and Black Flags : artpolitics of punk -- Prehistory of political aesthetics -- Red, gold, black, and green : black nationalist aesthetics -- Arthistorical themes -- Political power and transcendental geometry : Republican classicism in early America.

Argues that the academy's obsession with language, and in particular with narrative, has become a sort of disease.

_Brings the writings of de Cleyre out of undeserved obscurity._.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Crispin Sartwell SUBSTANCE AND SIGNIFICANCE: A THEORY OF POETRY Jean-Paul Sartre once said that what distinguishes the writer of poetry from the writer of prose is that the poet "considers words as things and not as signs."1 I think that this claim embodies a deep insight into the nature of poetry, and I want to develop it into a reasonably precise account of what poetry is. The (...) immediate problem that arises from Sartre's view is that it seems mysterious how anyone could regard words as objects without being fundamentally confused. For it is clear that Sartre thinks that the poet regards words as material objects. But a word, or a sequence of words such as a poem, is not a material object. A word or a poem can appear in many places at the same time; it can be inscribed, read, recited, or mentally traversed. The poem "itself" is not identical with any of these particular manifestations. I can burn my copy of Shakespeare's sonnets, but I cannot burn Shakespeare's sonnets; a poem is, in the phrase of Arthur Danto, "logically incombustible."2 Shakespeare's manuscript is lost; the sonnets live on. My recitation of a poem ends, say, at three o'clock, but the poem itself does not cease to exist at three o'clock. If identical objects cannot have divergent properties, then the poem is not identical with any of its particular manifestations. Nor can we identify a poem as the scattered, diffuse object consisting of all its inscriptions or recitations; to do so would be to identify the poem with a (perhaps massive) repetition of itself. A sonnet has fourteen lines, but the set of all the inscriptions ofShakespeare's "Shall I compare thee to a summer's Philosophy and Literature, © 1991, 15: 246-259 Crispin Sartwell247 day" is an item with an extraordinarily large number oflines. The poem itself does not grow as the set of its inscriptions grows. The poem, to repeat, is not a material object; rather, it is that which all the manifestations of it have in common; it is the structure or sequence which all the inscriptions and recitations share in virtue of which they are inscriptions and recitations of the poem. Now I do not intend to tackle the ontological problems surrounding poetry in any full-fledged way; to do so would strand us in extremely rugged metaphysical terrain. The ontological status of a poem might be in some ways analogous to the ontological status of a number, a property, and other purportedly "abstract" objects. And one cannot distinguish works ofpoetry from works ofprose (and, again, the project here is to make such a distinction) ontologically. Moby Dick is logically incombustible, as are, discouragingly enough, government reports. I propose, then, to adopt a familiar way of talking about the poem itself in distinction from its inscriptions, recitations, and mental traversais; I shall term a poem a type of which there are tokens. The tokens are the inscriptions, recitations, and so forth; the type is what these inscriptions and recitations have in common. The type/token terminology was first adopted by Peirce, and has been taken up by Wollheim, among many others.3 In itself, such terminology does little to disperse various ontological problems, but I am going to proceed in the touching faith that such puzzles can eventually be solved, because the theory of poetry I will develop depends on some such distinction being made out. And though the theory could perhaps be reconstructed even on a fairly thoroughgoing nominalism, I am going to treat poems as abstract entities, because as far as I can see, nominalism of the type endorsed by Nelson Goodman, for example, introduces more difficulties than it solves. Goodman identifies inscriptions ofa poem (for example) as items which display sameness ofspelling, which, relative to a system of notation, correspond exactly with regard to the sequence of letters, spaces, and punctuation marks.4 Among other things, this makes poetry (or any linguistic item) impossible to translate into different languages; it even makes it impossible to update, say, The Canterbury Tales into contemporary spelling. Now in fact there are severe and special translation problems... (shrink)

Abstract The first several chapters of the Bhagavad Git? set themselves a daunting task: to explain how a life of action can be rendered compatible with a life of renunciation of desire. The situation, in fact, is designed to raise the issue in an excruciatingly intense form. As Krsna and Arjuna pause on the verge of the great battle, Arjuna asks how killing people?including his own teachers and members of his own family?in order to secure power and fame, can be (...) squared with his religious and ethical convictions. This paper is an attempt to explicate Krsna's solution of the paradox, not from the point of view of Hindu tradition (in which it has, of course, driven whole movements of thought), but simply as a philosophical problem in its own right. I will argue that the paradox of the Git? suggests a reconstrual of the way we conceive the relation of means and ends in our activities, a reconstrual that can be profitably elucidated through the concept of art. And I will argue that this reconstrual has the potential to change our relations to our world and to one another in a way that is deeply life?affirming. (shrink)

Explores leadership and civic virtue in American culture.

If Joan of Arc were to be reincarnated as an American atheist, she'd be Voltairine de Cleyre. De Cleyre is an almost forgotten figure, but she committed her life to a vision of human liberation, a vision which encompassed even the man who tried to kill her. She was an incandescent writer and an original thinker, though she also lived much of her life in despair to the point of suicide.

In seeking insight into the intellectual underpinnings of the current “second culture war” and the emphasis on the campus left on speech repression, this chapter turns back to the first culture war of the late 1980s and early 1990s. In particular, it considers the linguistic constructivism put forward by figures such as Richard Rorty, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Nelson Goodman at the height of postmodernism. This philosophy attributes great power to words, even regarding language as the material out of which reality (...) is built, and it has become almost common coin, especially in various humanities departments. It motivates the control of expression, but that control is only as legitimate as the metaphysics underlying it—the views about truth, reality, and representation—is plausible. Perhaps the turn in philosophy toward realist metaphysics, among other developments, provides a ray of hope in the politically unanimous academy. (shrink)