Showing papers on "Enlightenment published in 1997"

The politics of truth

Abstract: In 1784, the German newspaper Berlinische Monatsschrift asked its audience to reply to the question "What is Enlightenment?" Immanuel Kant took the opportunity to investigate the purported truths and assumptions of his age. Two hundred years later, Michel Foucault wrote a response to Kant's initial essay, positioning Kant as the initiator of the discourse and critique of modernity. The Politics of Truth takes this initial encounter between Foucault and Kant, as a framework for its selection of unpublished essays and transcripts of lectures Foucault gave in America and France between 1978 and 1984, the year of his death. Ranging from reflections on the Enlightenment and revolution to a consideration of the Frankfurt School, this collection offers insight into the topics preoccupying Foucault as he worked on what would be his last body of published work, the three-volume History of Sexuality. It also offers what is in a sense the most "American" moment of Foucault's thinking, for it was in America that he realized the necessity of tying his own thought to that of the Frankfurt School.

Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter Between Asian and Western Thought

Abstract: What is the place of Eastern thought - Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, Confucianism - in the Western intellectual tradition? Oriental Enlightenment shows how, despite current talk of 'globalization', there is still a reluctance to accept that the West could have borrowed anything of significance from the East, and explores a critique of the 'orientalist' view that we must regard any study of the East through the lens of Western colonialism and domination.Oriental Enlightenment provides a lucid introduction to the fascination Eastern thought has exerted on Western minds since the Renaissance.

Social theory of the Scottish Enlightenment

Abstract: The Enlightenment and Scotland society and the critique of individualism science, explanation and history social diversity social history commercial history social values reading the Scottish enlightenment.

Rewriting the self : histories from the Renaissance to the present

Abstract: Section 1: Renaissance and Early Modern 1. Representations of the self from Petrarch to Descartes, Peter Burke 2. Self and selfhood in the seventeenth century, Jonathan Sawday 3. Self-reflection and the self, Roger Smith Section 2: Enlightenment 4. Religions Experience and the Formation of the Early Enlightenment Self, Jane Shaw 5. The European enlightenment and the history of the self, E.J. Hundert 6. The Death and rebirth of character in the 18th century, Sylvana Tomaselli 7. `Another Self in the Case': Gender, Marriage, and the Individual in Augustan Literature, Carolyn Williams 8. Feelings and novels, John Mullan Section 3: Romanticism 9. Romantic Travel, Roger Cardinal 10. "...as a rule, I does not mean I": Personal Identity and the Victorian Woman Poet, Kate Flint 11. Mapping the Self: Gender, space and Modernity in mid-Victorian London, Lynn Nead 12. Stories of the Eye, Daniel Pick Section 4: Modern and Post-Modern 13. The Modern Auditory I, Steve Connor 14. Assembling the modern self, Nikolas Rose 15. Death and the self, Jonathan Dollimore 16. Self-Undoing Subjects, Terry Eagleton.

The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

Abstract: The phenomenal bestselling self-help book of its generation - for spiritual followers of the Dalai Lama and Deepak Chopra. Eckhart Tolle demonstrates how to live a healthier and happier life by living in the present moment. To make the journey into The Power of Now we will need to leave our analytical mind and its false created self, the ego, behind. Although the journey is challenging, Eckhart Tolle offers simple language and a question and answer format to guide us. Surrender to the present moment, where problems do not exist. It is here we find our joy, are able to embrace our true selves and discover that we are already complete and perfect. If we are able to be fully present and take each step in the Now we will be opening ourselves to the transforming experience of THE POWER OF NOW. It's a book to be revisited again and again.

The Resurgence Of The Real: Body, Nature, And Place In A Hypermodern World

Abstract: In this insightful,beautifully written work, one of America's most important feminist ecological thinkers reflects on the roots of modernity in Renaissance humanism, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, Spretnak argues that an "ecological postmodern" ethos is emerging in the 1990s the creative cosmos, and the complex sense of place" Both a sharp critique and a graceful performance of the art of the possible, The Resurgence of the Real changes the way we think about living in the modern world

Psychoanalytic Culture: Psychoanalytic Discourse in Western Society

Abstract: Introduction Psychoanalysis and Discourse PART ONE: OBJECT RELATIONS THEORIES: SELF AND SOCIETY Groups, Identity and Forms of Knowledge Religious Belief, Charity and Crooked Cures War Breaking Out, in Inner and Outer Space PART TWO: CRITICAL THEORIES: INDIVIDUALITY AND CULTURE Individuality, Enlightenment and the Psy-Complex Authoritarianism, Ideology and Masculinity Culture and Nature after Enlightenment PART THREE: POST-THEORIES: SUBJECTIVITY AND THE SOCIAL Symbolic Orders, Subjects and Cyberspace Mirroring, Imagining and Escaping the Local Economy Real Things, Recovery and Therapy

Translating the Enlightenment : Scottish civic discourse in eighteenth-century Germany

Abstract: This is a study of the transmission of political ideas across languages and cultures, and in particular of a notably fruitful encounter between two distinct branches of eighteenth-century political discourse: the reception of Scottish civic ideas, developed most powerfully in the works of the Edinburgh historian-philosopher Adam Ferguson, by Geman intellectuals of the Enlightenment and Romantic eras. Fania Oz-Salzberger's detailed and challenging analysis places Ferguson in the context of the Scottish Enlightenment, and explores the impact of his theories on German Enlightenment thinkers. She traces the passage of Ferguson's civic humanism across linguistic and cultural borders, and highlights the linguistic stumbling-blocks and conceptual tensions that resulted. Dr Oz-Salzberger argues that there resulted a complex and largely unintentional shift of Scottish civic concepts into a German vocabulary of spiritual perfection and inner life, and that the misreading of Ferguson and other Scottish thinkers contributed much to the richness of German intellectual life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The Enlightenment's Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society

Abstract: Acknowledgements A note on the text Introduction and agenda 1. The foundations of a project 2. Self-love and the civilizing process 3. Performance principles of the public sphere 4. A world of goods 5. Imposing closure - Adam Smith's problem Epilogue: The Fable's modern fate Bibliography Index.

In Search of the True Gypsy: From Enlightenment to Final Solution

Abstract: CHOICE - "This is a book sure to elicit continued controversy and should be part of every Gypsy collection, but it will be of limited interest to nonspecialists". Patterns of Prejudice, Vol 34, No 1 "Willem"s work is a very important and welcome addition." Holocaust and Genocide Studies "Willem"s study will become a milestone in the history of research on the Gypsies, because it, in excellent fashion, makes this very history its theme.

Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture

Abstract: Introduction - reflections on the scope of the tectonic Greco-Gothic and neo-Gothic - the Anglo-French origins of tectonic form the rise of the tectonic - core form and art form in the German Enlightenment, 1750-1870 Frank Lloyd Wright and the text-tile tectonic Auguste Perret and classical rationalism Mies van der Rohe - avant-garde and continuity Louis Kahn - modernization and the New Monumentality, 1944-1972 Jorn Utzon - transcultural form and the tectonic metaphor Carlo Scarpa and the adoration of the joint postscriptum - the tectonic trajectory, 1903-1994 the owl of Minerva - an epilogue.

Enthusiasm : the antiself of enlightenment

Abstract: TW A Te are moving toward a reassessment of Enlightenment, in which there will no longer be "The Enlightenment,"a unitary and universal phenomenon with a single history to be either celebrated or condemned, but instead a family of discourses arising about the same time in a number of European cultures, Protestant as well as Catholic, insular as well as peninsular, and certainly not all occasioned by the Parisian intellectual hegemony that sought to establish itself among them. This view reasserts the diversity of cultures, some of them national and some of them built by states, in a Europe presenting itself at the end of the twentieth century as a cultural homogenization bent on the destruction of both states and nations; in resisting this aggression, the study of Enlightenment discourses seeks to maintain the open society by articulating the diversity of voices within it. Within a family of Enlightenments, furthermore, there is room for the recognition of family quarrels, some of them bitter and terrible in their conduct; and in escaping the false unity of "The Enlightenment," we escape the error of regarding "it" as culminating in "The Enlightenment Project," a construct invented by both left and right in order that they many denounce it (thus imposing on the open society the poverty of historicism). This enterprise, however malevolent, focuses on a problem others may wish to discuss: how it was that Enlightenment, very often at its beginnings a program of persuading the human mind to recognize its limitations, in certain cases became a program of revolutionary triumphalism. This did sometimes happen; the historicist error is that of supposing that all roads led to this conclusion. By first pluralizing the Enlightenments, and then by focusing upon the concept of enthusiasm-one of the key words in the Enlightened lexicon-this essay attempts to show that the Enlightenments from their outset recognized the possibility of an intellectual fanaticism arising within as well as without the enterprises in which they were engaged.

Social identity in imperial Russia

Abstract: How did enlightened Russians of the eighteenth century understand society? And how did they reconcile their professed ideals of equality and justice with the authoritarian political structures in which they lived? Historian Elise Wirtschafter turns to literary plays to reconstruct the social thinking of the past and to discover how Enlightenment Russians understood themselves. Opening with an illuminating discussion of the development of theater in eighteenth-century Russia, Wirtschafter goes on to explore dramatic representations of key social questions. Based on an examination of nearly 300 secular plays written during the last half of the century, she shows how dramas for the stage represented and debated important public issues such as the nature of the common good, the structure of the patriarchal household, the duty of monarchs, and the role of the individual in society. Wirtschafter presents a striking reconstruction of the way educated Russians conceptualized a society beyond the immediate spheres of household and locality. Seeking to highlight problems of "social consciousness," she asks what Enlightenment Russians thought about social experience and how their ideas related to actual social relationships in a society organized around serfdom and absolute monarchy. She portrays Russian Enlightenment culture on its own terms, while at the same time shedding light on broader problems of social order and political authority in imperial Russia."

The enlightenment above national context: political economy in eighteenth-century scotland and naples

Abstract: It is now common to study the Enlightenment ‘in national context’, and in few cases has the approach been more fertile than in the study of the Scottish Enlightenment. The danger of this approach, however, is that it deflects attention from the international connections of the Enlightenment, fragmenting the movement as a whole. It is argued here that the Enlightenment is better understood as an intellectual movement which was both cosmopolitan and patriotic, and that this is particularly evident in its commitment to political economy, as the key to improving the human condition in this world. The argument is developed through a comparison of Scottish and Neapolitan political economy from the mid- to the later eighteenth century. Though set apart by very different economic circumstances, the Scots and the Neapolitans had a common point of reference in French economic writings, and through these Hume's ideas in particular were transmitted to Naples. It was from within this common intellectual framework that the Scots and the Neapolitans elaborated their distinctive positions on the scope for free trade between nations. If Hume and Smith believed that poor countries such as Scotland would prosper through greater free trade, while Genovesi and Galiani argued that only by measures of protection could the abundant natural resources of the kingdom of Naples be harnessed to its benefit, their differences derived from shared premises, and a comparable fear of the inclination of the leading mercantile powers, Britain and France, to control trade to their sole advantage.

In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals Between Apocalypse and Enlightenment

Abstract: These essays by eminent European intellectual and cultural historian Anson Rabinbach address the writings of key figures in twentieth-century German philosophy. Rabinbach explores their ideas in relation to the two world wars and the horrors facing Europe at that time. Analyzing the work of Benjamin and Bloch, he suggests their indebtedness to the traditions of Jewish messianism. In a discussion of Hugo Ball's little-known "Critique of the German Intelligentsia," Rabinbach reveals the curious intellectual career of the Dadaist and antiwar activist turned-nationalist and anti-Semite. His examination of Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism" and Jaspers's "The Question of German Guilt" illuminates the complex and often obscure political referents of these texts. Turning to Horkheimer and Adorno's "Dialectic of Enlightenment," Rabinbach offers an arresting new interpretation of this central text of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. Subtly and persuasively argued, his book will become an indispensable reference point for all concerned with twentieth-century German history and thought.

Civil society theory, enlightenment and critique

Abstract: This essay examines the current state of civil society theory and its debt to Enlightenment concepts of civil society. The central argument is that contemporary civil society theory loses touch both with the critical aspect of enlightenment thought itself and with the critique of enlightenment thought that we find most developed in Hegel and Marx. After charting the development of the Enlightenment perspectives on civil society, and the critique that Hegel and Marx make of civil society, two related points are made: first, that it is one‐sided and menacing to grant primacy to civil society, just as it is to grant primacy to the state or to the market; second, that further research in the area should develop a ‘third way’: one that recognizes the validity of the concept of civil society without romanticizing it, without idealizing it, and without abstracting it from its social and historical ground. In conclusion, it is argued that the identification of civil society with ethical life not only avoids confr...

Wittgenstein and post‐analytic philosophy of education: Rorty or Lyotard?

Abstract: I was thinking about my philosophical work and saying to myself: ‘I destroy, I destroy, I destroy…’ Context: The ‘linguistic turn’ of Western philosophy (Heidegger's later works, the penetration of Anglo-American philosophies into European thought, the development of language technologies); and correlatively, the decline of universalist discourses (the metaphysical doctrines of modern times: narratives of progress, of socialism, of abundance, of knowledge). The weariness with regard to ‘theory’, and the miserable slackening that goes along with it (new this, new that, post-this, post-that, etc.). The time has come to philosophize. …there is no danger of philosophy's ‘coming to an end’. Religion did not come to an end in the Enlightenment, nor painting in Impressionism. Even if the period from Plato to Nietzsche is encapsulated and ‘distanced’ in the way Heidegger suggests, and even if twentieth-century philosophy comes to seem a stage of awkward transitional backing and filling (as sixteenth-century philosophy now seems to us), there will be something called ‘philosophy’ on the other side of the transition.

The American Enlightenment, 1750-1820

Abstract: Preface 1. Finding the Revolution 2. What Is Enlightenment? Some American Answers 3. Religious Voices 4. Writing the Revolution 5. The Literature of Public Documents 6. The Limits of Enlightenment Bibliography Index

John Gregory (1724-1773) and his lectures on the duties and qualifications of a physician establishing modern medical ethics on the base of the moral philosophy and the theory of science of the empiric British Enlightenment.

Abstract: In 1769/70 the Scottish physician and philosopher John Gregory (1724-1773) published Lectures On the Duties and Qualifications of a Physician. Gregory developed a truely ethical - in the sense of (moral) philosophically based - system of conduct in a physician. His concept of practising and teaching ethics in medicine and science is established on a very broad footing: combining Bacon's (1561-1626) general philosophy of nature and science with both, the general, likewise empirically based moral philosophy of his personal friend David Hume (1711-1776), and with the principles upheld by the so-called Common-Sense Philosophy. His Lectures had - particularly via the famous Code of Medical Ethics of Thomas Percival (1740-1804) - a decisive influence on our contemporary concepts of ethics in medicine and science. John Gregory is, without doubt, one of the most important and certainly the most comprehensive among the founders of what is known today as modern Bioethics.

Medicine and morals in the Enlightenment

Abstract: Acknowledgements. 1. Interpreting Eighteenth-Century Medical Ethics. Etiquette and Monopoly. Sympathy and Contract. A New Interpretation. 2. John Gregory: Medical Ethics and Common Sense. Personality and Profession. The Art and Science of Medicine. Duties of a Polite Profession. 3. Thomas Percival: The Duty of Public Office. Character and Context. Medical Ethics and Medical Practice. 4. Benjamin Rush: Medical Ethics for a New Republic. Character and Connections. Medical Science. Medicalized Ethics. Notes. Epilogue. Index.

Strong Hermeneutics: Contingency and Moral Identity

Abstract: Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in ethics, particularly in the approaches of deconstruction and hermeneutics. At the same time, questions of identity have risen to prominence in philosophy and beyond into cultural studies and literature. Strong Hermeneutics is a clear and accessible investigation of both the enlightenment and postmodern or 'weak' approaches to contemporary discussions of ethics. The weak view, which can be traced back to Nietzche and seen in the recent work of Rorty and Lyotard, is sceptical of any universal principles in ethics. The enlightenment view, starting with Kant and more recently seen in the work of Habermas, views identity as subject to universal but formal moral constraints, the renewing of which is the proper task of ethics. Nicholas Smith argues that neither of these views can provide a proper framework for ethics. He puts forward a third position - a strong hermeneutics - drawing on the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur and Charles Taylor. Strong Hermeneutics presents a defence of this view, compares it with the realism and anti-realism debate in philosophy, and demonstrates its relevance to contemporary issues, particularly ecological responsibility.

Conservatism: An Anthology of Social and Political Thought from David Hume to the Present

Abstract: At a time when the label "conservative" is indiscriminately applied to fundamentalists, populists, libertarians, fascists and the advocates of one or another orthodoxy, this book offers a historically informed presentation of what is distinctive about conservative social and political thought. It is an anthology with an argument, locating the origins of modern conservatism within the Enlightenment and distinguishing between conservatism and orthodoxy. Bringing togther important specimens of European and American conservative social and political analysis from the mid-18th century through to our own day, the book demonstrates that while the particular institutions that conservatives have sought to conserve have varied, there are characteristic features of conservative argument that recur over time and across national borders. The book proceeds chronologically through the following sections: "Enlightenment Conservatism" (David Hume, Edmund Burke and Justus Moser), "The Critique of Revolution" (Burke, Louis de Bonald, Joesph de Maistre, James Madison and Rufus Choate), "Authority" (Matthew Arnold, James Fitzjames Stephen), "Inequality" (W.H. Mallock, Joseph A. Schumpter), "The Critique of Good Intentions" (William Graham Sumner), "War" (T.E. Hulme), "Democracy" (Carl Schmitt, Schumpeter), "The Limits of Rationalism" (Winston Churchill, Michael Oakeshott, Friedrich Hayek, Edward Banfield), "The Critique of Social and Cultural Emancipation" (Irving Kristol, Peter Berger and Richard John Neuhaus, Hermann Lubbe), and "Between Social Science and Cultural Criticism" (Arnold Gehlen, Philip Rieff). The book contains an afterword on recurrent tensions and dilemmas of conservative thought.

The problem of being modern, or, The German pursuit of Enlightenment from Leibniz to the French Revolution

Abstract: A reading of German intellectual history in the context of European thought, this book aims to give insights into the development of the Enlightenment in Germany. It argues that writers of the period tried to reconcile traditional Protestant beliefs about God with modern scientific discoveries.

Is Nietzsche a political thinker

Abstract: Nietzsche claimed to be a political thinker in Ecce Homo and elsewhere. He constantly compared his thought with other political theorists, chiefly Rousseau, Kant and Mill, and he claimed to offer an alternative to the bankruptcy of Enlightenment liberalism. It is worthwhile re‐examining Nietzsche's claim to offer serious criticisms of liberal political philosophy. I shall proceed by setting out seven criteria for serious political thought: understanding of material need; procedural justification; liberty and its worth; racial, ethnic and religious difference; gender and family; justice between nations; and moral psychology. I shall argue polemically that on the first six issues Nietzsche has nothing to offer, but that on the seventh, moral psychology, he makes a profound contribution. Serious political theory, however, needs to forget about Nietzsche and turn to those thinkers he found so boring ‐ the liberal Enlightenment thinkers.

Theological Anthropology: Toward Integrating Theosis and Justification by Faith

Abstract: Introduction It is arguable today that the historical-critical task of the convergence method in ecumenical studies is largely accomplished and that we are in a stage of reception, the results of which are not yet fully clear.(1) In that case, the way forward lies in mutual theological experimentation.(2) The North American bilateral volume, Salvation in Christ: A Lutheran-Orthodox Dialogue,(3) brims with new theological possibilities for the construction of an evangelical and orthodox theological witness in a post-Constantinian world. The present study is undertaken in the prospect of building critically upon the achievements of the official bilateral dialogue, yet with the freedom to experiment and explore integrative possibilities. I venture that it will be by doing theology integratively that we will, in Orthodox theologian John Breck's words, "transcend our differences of history and culture, in order to discover the depth and breadth of the theology that does in fact unite us."(4) We can integrate the concerns of each theological tradition by turning together ad fontes. "[T]he native tongue of Christians, for the theological expression as well as for speaking of the Christian life, is the language of the Bible," the dialogue reported.(5) "[B]oth traditions have continued to employ the language of the Bible as the primary vehicle of theological expression and spiritual understanding."(6) Of course, such a turn to the language of the Bible is not so simple today. Speaking from the Lutheran side in the time of a profound crisis of faith and Christian identity(7) after the collapse of Protestant biblicism,(8) there is a perceived need to recover the Orthodox, that is, the early Catholic understanding of the authority of Scripture in the church.(9) The vision here is of a process of Holy Tradition(10) whose content is the divine economy or salvation history. The Agreed Statement on Revelation of the Lutheran-Orthodox international joint commission states: The revelation of God, even as contained in Scripture, transcends all verbal expressions. It is hidden from all creatures, especially from sinful man (Greek: the 'old man'). Its true meaning is revealed only through the Holy Spirit in the living experience of salvation, which is accomplished in the church through the Christian life. This catholic experience of salvation in the church is at the same time the only authentic expression of the true understanding of the Word of God.(11) Here the concepts of the church as the eucharistic community extending through time and space, salvation as forgiveness and newness of life, and the authority of revelation as enacting the salvation event are mutually integral. Assuming this kind of reintegration of the understanding of authoritative revelation in the church and as an experience of salvation, I will be trying in what follows to uncover the salvation-history presuppositions of the Lutheran doctrine of justification and its implications for theological anthropology in dialogue with Orthodox understanding of the human vocation. Theological Anthropology in the Lutheran-Orthodox Dialogue Classical Christian faith posited the notion of a universal humanity. This belief in the unity of humanity corresponds to faith in God the Creator and the divine plan of salvation. The horizon of human life on the earth, when it is construed as a meaningful history, is the reign of God. Vice versa, the very notion that human life on the earth coheres in and as meaningful history is an act of faith in the reality of the reign. It is a truism that secular thought since the Enlightenment has lost this faith and, with it, this theological anthropology - a turn of events that dogmatically devastated classical Lutheranism, as Wilhelm Mauer has searchingly described.(12) That loss is the broad contemporary context, however, for all Christian traditions; indeed, in some ways it provides the chief motive of ecumenical theology itself. …

The Scottish contribution to the Enlightenment

Abstract: The Scottish Enlightenment was only born as a distinct subject of scholarship between thirty and forty years ago. The exact date of birth is uncertain, because paternity, or at least credit for the name, was promptly disputed by Hugh Trevor-Roper and the late Duncan Forbes. Their dispute was enlivened by obvious differences of style and tone they certainly made the most of it; but its keenness always belied the extent to which the protagonists' conceptions of the new subject were complementary. Forbes developed his account in a series of studies of Hume and Smith, culminating in Hume's Philosophical Politics (1975); but even more important was the Special Subject which he offered in Cambridge in the 1960s. Entitled "Hume, Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment" in order to be accepted by a Faculty sceptical of the existence of the Scottish Enlightenment as such, this attracted Quentin Skinner, Nicholas Phillipson, and many others: it was to be seminal not only for the Scottish Enlightenment, but for the whole renaissance of intellectual history in Britain since the 1960s. [1] As the title of the course indicates, Forbes's Scottish Enlightenment was an intellectual movement to which others besides Hume and Smith had made important contributions, and which had concentrated upon the understanding of society and its development; it was also a cosmopolitan movement, whose frame of reference extended well beyond Britain. A similar conception informed Trevor-Roper's interpretative sketch of the Scottish Enlightenment as a whole, in his address to the Enlightenment Conference of 1966 in St Andrews, published in the following year. Stimulated both by the opening-up of eighteenth-century Scotland to new ideas from continental Europe and by their country's experience of unusually rapid economic and social development, Trevor-Roper argued, the Scottish thinkers had made common intellectual cause in exploring what they termed 'the progress of society'. [2]

Buddhist Cosmology: Philosophy and Origins

Abstract: This extensively researched and illustrated volume offers Western readers a rare introduction to Buddhism's complex and fascinating views about the structure of the universe. The book begins by clearly explaining classical cosmology, with its symmetrical, India-centered universe and multitudinous heavens and hells, and illuminates the cosmos's relation to the human concerns of karma, transmigration, and enlightenment. It moves on to discuss the Mahayana conception of the universe as a lotus flower containing uncountable realms, each with its own buddha. Then, examining changes in the notions of hell and the gods, the author traces Buddhism's gradual shift from a religion to a mythology. Throughout, treatment of Buddhism's historical, geographical, and doctrinal origins complements detailed cosmological descriptions. Finally, the author shows us how this ancient philosophy resembles the modern scientific view of the cosmos, and how even today it can help us lead more fulfilling lives.