Last Writings

Last Writings
Author: Nishida Kitaro
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 164
Release: 1993-06-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780824815547

Nishida Kitarô, Japan's premier modern philosopher, was born in 1870 and grew to intellectual maturity in the final decades of the Meiji period (1868–1912). He achieved recognition as Japan's leading establishment philosopher during his tenure as professor of philosophy at Kyoto University. After his retirement in 1927, and until his death in 1945, Nishida published a continuous stream of original essays that can best be described as intercivilizational, a meeting point of East and West. His final essay, "The Logic of the Place of Nothingness and the Religious Worldview," completed in the last few months before his death, is a summation of his philosophy of religion and has come to be regarded as the foundational text of the Kyoto school. It is one of the few places in his writings where Nishida draws openly and freely on East Asian Buddhist sources as analogs of his own ideas. Here Nishida argues for the existential primordiality of the religious consciousness against Kant, while also critically engaging the thought of such authors as Aristotle, the Christian Neo-Platonists, Spinoza, Fichte, Hegel, Barth, and Tillich. He makes it clear that he is also indebted to Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Dostoievsky as well as to Nâgârjuna, the Ch'an masters, Shinran, Dôgen, and other Buddhist thinkers. This book--a translation of the most seminal work of Nishida's career--also includes a translation of his "Last Writing" (Zeppitsu), written just two days before his death.

Last Looks, Last Books

Last Looks, Last Books
Author: Helen Vendler
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 165
Release: 2010-03-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1400834325

Modern American poets writing in the face of death In Last Looks, Last Books, the eminent critic Helen Vendler examines the ways in which five great modern American poets, writing their final books, try to find a style that does justice to life and death alike. With traditional religious consolations no longer available to them, these poets must invent new ways to express the crisis of death, as well as the paradoxical coexistence of a declining body and an undiminished consciousness. In The Rock, Wallace Stevens writes simultaneous narratives of winter and spring; in Ariel, Sylvia Plath sustains melodrama in cool formality; and in Day by Day, Robert Lowell subtracts from plenitude. In Geography III, Elizabeth Bishop is both caught and freed, while James Merrill, in A Scattering of Salts, creates a series of self-portraits as he dies, representing himself by such things as a Christmas tree, human tissue on a laboratory slide, and the evening/morning star. The solution for one poet will not serve for another; each must invent a bridge from an old style to a new one. Casting a last look at life as they contemplate death, these modern writers enrich the resources of lyric poetry.

Kafka's Last Trial

Kafka's Last Trial
Author: Benjamin Balint
Publisher: Picador
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2019-08-22
Genre: Inheritance and succession
ISBN: 9781509836734

When Franz Kafka died in 1924, his loyal friend and champion Max Brod could not bring himself to fulfil Kafka's last instruction: to burn his remaining manuscripts. Instead, Brod devoted the rest of his life to canonizing Kafka as the most prescient chronicler of the twentieth century. By betraying Kafka's last wish, Brod twice rescued his legacy - first from physical destruction, and then from obscurity. But that betrayal also led to an international legal battle over which country could lay claim to Kafka's legacy: Germany, where Kafka's own sister perished in the Holocaust and where he would have suffered a similar fate had he remained, or Israel? At once a brilliant biographical portrait of Kafka and Brod and the influential group of writers and intellectuals known as the Prague Circle, Kafka's Last Trial offers a gripping account of the controversial trial in Israeli courts - brimming with dilemmas legal, ethical, and political - that determined the fate of the manuscripts Brod had rescued when he fled with Kafka's papers at the last possible moment from Prague to Palestine in 1939. It describes a wrenching escape from Nazi invaders as the gates of Europe closed; of a love affair between exiles stranded in Tel Aviv; and two countries whose national obsessions with overcoming the traumas of the past came to a head in a fascinating and hotly contested trial. Ultimately, Benjamin Balint invites us to question: who owns a literary legacy - the country of one's language and birth or of one's cultural and religious affinities - and what nation can claim a right to it.

Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions at Fifty

Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions at Fifty
Author: Robert J. Richards
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2016-03-25
Genre: Science
ISBN: 022631717X

Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was a watershed event when it was published in 1962, upending the previous understanding of science as a slow, logical accumulation of facts and introducing, with the concept of the “paradigm shift,” social and psychological considerations into the heart of the scientific process. More than fifty years after its publication, Kuhn’s work continues to influence thinkers in a wide range of fields, including scientists, historians, and sociologists. It is clear that The Structure of Scientific Revolutions itself marks no less of a paradigm shift than those it describes. In Kuhn’s “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” at Fifty, leading social scientists and philosophers explore the origins of Kuhn’s masterwork and its legacy fifty years on. These essays exhume important historical context for Kuhn’s work, critically analyzing its foundations in twentieth-century science, politics, and Kuhn’s own intellectual biography: his experiences as a physics graduate student, his close relationship with psychologists before and after the publication of Structure, and the Cold War framework of terms such as “world view” and “paradigm.”

Last Words

Last Words
Author: William S. Burroughs
Publisher: Grove Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2000
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780802137784

Laid out as diary entries of the last nine months of Burroughs's life, "Last Words" spans the realms of cultural criticism, personal memoir, and fiction. Classic Burroughs concerns--literature, U.S. drug policy, the state of humanity, his love for his cats--permeate this poignant portrait of the man, his life, and the creative process.

Objectivity and Diversity

Objectivity and Diversity
Author: Sandra Harding
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2015-05-18
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 022624136X

Worries about scientific objectivity just won t go away, but by now, it s safe to say, no one who reflects on the appropriate role of values and interests in scientific research thinks it is or could be free of them. It now seems obvious that social, political, and economic values and interests influence research on weapons, for example, or health and the environment. Yet the dominant late twentieth-century philosophies of science have tended to conceptualize the reliability and predictive power of the results of research as damaged by such values and interests, and they continue to do so in spite of powerful analyses of how sciences operate in practice and in spite of the rise around the globe in the last four decades of various forms of participatory action research and citizen science, both of which take their research agendas from the concerns of disadvantaged groups. Why are the epistemic/scientific norm of objectivity and the social/political norm of diversity still perceived as inevitably in conflict with each other? Why aren t they perceived as in conflict only sometimes, but many times as providing valuable resources for each other? How can we promote science that is both more epistemically adequate and socially just? Sandra Harding probes these questions with clarity and concrete cases, and in doing so puts severe pressure on conventional philosophies of science and points to intellectually sounder and politically more progressive ways to think about them. She proposes a new way to relink sciences and their philosophies to democratic social relations, even while these are themselves undergoing transformations. A must read for anyone interested in how to think about the politics of science globally."

The Last Book Party

The Last Book Party
Author: Karen Dukess
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2019-07-09
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1250225469

*A July 2019 Indie Next List Great Read* *One of Parade's Most Anticipated Books of Summer 2019* *An O Magazine Best Beach Read of 2019* *A New York Post Best Beach Read of 2019* “The Last Book Party is a delight. Reading this story of a young woman trying to find herself while surrounded by the bohemian literary scene during a summer on the Cape in the late '80s, I found myself nodding along in so many moments and dreading the last page. Karen Dukess has rendered a wonderful world to spend time in.” —Taylor Jenkins Reid, New York Times bestselling author of Daisy Jones & The Six A propulsive tale of ambition and romance, set in the publishing world of 1980’s New York and the timeless beaches of Cape Cod. In the summer of 1987, 25-year-old Eve Rosen is an aspiring writer languishing in a low-level assistant job, unable to shake the shadow of growing up with her brilliant brother. With her professional ambitions floundering, Eve jumps at the chance to attend an early summer gathering at the Cape Cod home of famed New Yorker writer Henry Grey and his poet wife, Tillie. Dazzled by the guests and her burgeoning crush on the hosts’ artistic son, Eve lands a new job as Henry Grey’s research assistant and an invitation to Henry and Tillie’s exclusive and famed "Book Party"— where attendees dress as literary characters. But by the night of the party, Eve discovers uncomfortable truths about her summer entanglements and understands that the literary world she so desperately wanted to be a part of is not at all what it seems. A page-turning, coming-of-age story, written with a lyrical sense of place and a profound appreciation for the sustaining power of books, Karen Dukess's The Last Book Party shows what happens when youth and experience collide and what it takes to find your own voice.

The Last Goodbye

The Last Goodbye
Author: Fiona Lucas
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 398
Release: 2021-06-08
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0063036398

An unforgettable story about learning to love again and living life to its fullest, perfect for fans of Jojo Moyes and Josie Silver. "A poignant and uplifting read about loss, love and learning to put yourself back together again after facing the unimaginable." —Sophie Cousens, New York Times bestselling author of This Time Next Year Lost love. A second chance. A hidden secret. Spencer was the love of Anna’s life: her husband, her best friend, her rock. She thought their love would last forever. But three years ago, Spencer was tragically killed in an accident and Anna’s world was shattered. How can she ever move on, when she’s lost her soulmate? On New Year’s Eve Anna calls Spencer’s phone number, just to hear his old voicemail greeting. But to her shock, someone answers… Brody has inherited Spencer’s old number and is the first person who truly understands what Anna’s going through. As her and Brody’s phone calls become lengthier and more frequent, they begin opening up to each other—and slowly rediscover how to smile, how to laugh, even how to hope. But Brody hasn’t been entirely honest with Anna. Will his secret threaten everything, just as it seems she might find the courage to love again?

The Last Words We Said

The Last Words We Said
Author: Leah Scheier
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2022-09-27
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1534469400

Nine months after Danny disappeared, his closest friends, Ellie, Rae, and Deenie, deal with their loss very differently but will have to share secrets about the night he disappeared to uncover the truth. Chapters alternate between past and present.

The Last Libertines

The Last Libertines
Author: Benedetta Craveri
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 617
Release: 2020-10-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1681373408

An enthralling work of history about the Libertine generation that came up during—and was eventually destroyed by—the French Revolution. The Last Libertines, as Benedetta Craveri writes in her preface to the book, is the story of a group of “seven aristocrats whose youth coincided with the French monarchy’s final moment of grace—a moment when it seemed to the nation’s elite that a style of life based on privilege and the spirit of caste might acknowledge the widespread demand for change, and in doing so reconcile itself with Enlightenment ideals of justice, tolerance, and citizenship.” Here we meet seven emblematic characters, whom Craveri has singled out not only for “the romantic character of their exploits and amours—but also by the keenness with which they experienced this crisis in the civilization of the ancien régime, of which they themselves were the emblem.” Displaying the aristocratic virtues of “dignity, courage, refinement of manners, culture, [and] wit,” the Duc de Lauzun, the Vicomte de Ségur, the Duc de Brissac, the Comte de Narbonne, the Chevalier de Boufflers, the Comte de Ségur, and the Comte de Vaudreuil were at the same time “irreducible individualists” and true “sons of the Enlightenment,” all of them ambitious to play their part in bringing around the great changes that were in the air. When the French Revolution came, however, they found themselves condemned to poverty, exile, and in some cases execution. Telling the parallel lives of these seven dazzling but little-remembered historical figures, Craveri brings the past to life, powerfully dramatizing a turbulent time that was at once the last act of a now-vanished world and the first act of our own.