I came across this great excerpt that Mark McKnight sent me a few months back and couldn’t help but share it. The word “Geosophy” is a compound of ‘ge’ (Greek for earth) and ‘sophia’ (Greek for knowledge). In Imagining the Future at Niagara Falls (1987), P. McGreevy refers to Geosophy as, “the study of the world as people conceive of and imagine it.”
J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series, delivered a great commencement address last week at Harvard University entitled, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination.”
If you haven’t already, see it, hear it, or read it here.
I had planned to spend a portion of my “winter break” reading a few of the books that have been sitting next to my bed for the last month or two – you know, the books that patiently wait their turn to be read but are often neglected due to school work. Well, unfortunately for those books, I received a Christmas gift that is either the greatest collection of essays ever or a total waste of time (depending on how you look at it). I like to think it’s the greatest collection of essays ever.
Seinfeld and Philosophy: A Book about Everything and Nothing opens with an preface by William Irwin that asks, “how can philosophy, the discipline which is ‘a more or less general theory of everything’ deal with a show which claims to be ‘about nothing’?” Well, as he puts it, “everything and nothing are sometimes not so far apart.”
Thirteen Seinfeld fans (who happen to be professional philosophers) examine the ideas, the stories, the jokes, and the characters. Each chapter is an extended academic style essay that manages to be both dense enough for those familiar with philosophy and accessible enough for the average fan to read.
How is Jerry like Socrates? Is it rational for George to “do the opposite?” Would Simone de Beauvoir say that Elaine is a feminist? Is Kramer stuck in Kierkegaard’s aesthetic stage?
Seinfeld and Philosophy is both an enlightening look at the most popular sitcom of the decade and an entertaining introduction to philosophy via Seinfeld’s plots and characters. These fourteen essays, which explore the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, Lao-Tzu, Heidegger, Kant, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Wittgenstein, will show readers how to be masters of their philosophical domain.
Seinfeld and Philosophy is just Vol. 1 in a series of “Popular Culture and Philosophy” books published by Open Court. I already know it’s my favorite, though.
Milan Cathedral, Milan, 1998 (detail)
© Thomas Struth
In The Politics of God – an essay adapted from his new book, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West – Mark Lilla considers the power of political theology. In this, his ability to present the history of theological politics up to the present day, in plain language, is masterful.
The full essay, as printed in the the latest New York Times Magazine, can be read online here. The article is lengthy but worth the read.
Additionally, I thought Thomas Struth‘s images were an interesting compliment to the text.
Read this in print if you can.
There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described.
– Garry Winogrand
The pictures are there and you just take them.
– Robert Capa
To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world — such are a few of the slightest pleasures of the independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito.
– Charles Baudelaire
