Liberalism and tradition

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Edith Kurzweil

Structuralism began in Saussurean linguistics and was enlarged by Claude Levi-Strauss into a new way of thinking that views our world as consisting of relationships between structures we create rather than of objective realities. The Age of Structuralism examines the work of seven writers who either expanded upon or reacted against Levi-Strauss. Placing these major figures in the context of political, historical, and psychoanalytic currents of the time. The Age of Structuralism is a commanding and far-reaching study of a decisive epoch in intellectual history. Kurzwell's new opening essay explains how these towering figures prefigured current emphasis on semiotics, post-structuralism, deconstruction, and post-post-modernism. Kurt H. Wolff called it "lucid, splendid and unobtrusive" when the book first appeared. It remains a central work in the appreciation of the French giants upon whose shoulders the new crop of thinkers expect to stand.

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His Holiness the Dalai Lama

Beyond Dogma presents a record of a 1993 visit to France by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, recipient of the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize and the world's most prominent Buddhist leader. During a series of public lectures and question-and-answer sessions with political activists, religious leaders, students, scientists, Buddhist practitioners, and interfaith organizations, His Holiness responds to a wide range of contemporary social, political, and religious issues. Topics include the practice of Buddhism in the West; nonviolence, human rights, and the Tibetan crisis; ecumenical approaches to spirituality; the meeting of Buddhism and science; and more.

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Mary Anne Perkins

Coleridge's status as a philosopher has often been questioned. 'I am a poor poet in England,' he admitted, 'but in America, I am a great philosopher.' J. S. Mill's assertion that 'the time is yet far distant when, in the estimation of Coleridge, and of his influence upon the intellect of our time, anything like unanimity can be looked for' seems to have been justified. Mary Anne Perkins re-examines Coleridge's claim to have developed a 'logosophic' system which attempted 'to reduce all knowledge into harmony'. She pays particular attention to his later writings, some of which are still unpublished. She suggests that the accusations of plagiarism and of muddled, abstruse metaphysics which have been levelled at him may be challenged by a thorough reading of his work in which his unifying principle is revealed. She explores the variations meanings of the term 'logos', a recurrent theme in every area of Coleridge's thought - philosophy, religion, natural science, history, political and social criticism, literary theory, and psychology. Coleridge was responding to the concerns of his own time, a revolutionary age in which increasing intellectual and moral fragmentation and confusion seemed to him to threaten both individuals and society. Drawing on the whole of Western intellectual history, he offered a ground for philosophy which was relational rather than mechanistic. He is one of those few thinkers whose work appears to become more interesting, his perceptions more acute, as the historical gulf widens. This book is a contribution to the reassessment that he deserves.

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Michael W. Charney

"Powerful Learning is the first intellectual history of one of the great Buddhist empires of Southeast Asia, Konbaung Burma, before the British conquest. The book challenges the notion of the court and the monastic order as static institutions by examining how competition within and between them prompted major rethinking about the intellectual foundations of indigenous society and culture. The catalyst for this reformation of indigenous thought was the rise of a small clique of Buddhist monks and lay people from the frontier to commanding positions in the state and monastic order over the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This clique had a major influence on the creation of state myths, the ways in which the throne ruled and presented itself, and, ultimately, the relationship between the throne and the state. The new state and monastic orthodoxy, however, was challenged by other Burmese literati, who, over the course of the nineteenth century, sought in Western science, technology, and political theory other ways in which to shape Burmese perspectives on state and society. In the process, the Burmese underwent a difficult transition from premodern to modern intellectual thought, one that helped usher in British rule." from publisher