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This book considers the role of postmodernism (skepticism towards metanarratives and anti-essentialism) in Ralph Waldo Emerson's philosophy by putting it in conversation with key 20th and 21st century thinkers such as Beauvoir, Coates, Derrida, Paz, Rorty, and Zizek. Postmodern Emerson shows how Emersonian skepticism to metanarratives such as sexism, racism, Beauvoiran "serious values," and others, can help us face some of society's gravest contemporary social and philosophical challenges. Methodologically, the book exemplifies Emersonian postmodernism by defying traditional philosophical metanarratives about the difference between high and low culture or serious and ridiculous subjects, and Emerson with what would seem to be his opposite. This is itself a postmodern gesture, breaking rules of genre and topic to make unlikely but interesting connections. Above all, this book proves that in this time of social division and widespread despair, Emerson canhelp.
List of contents
1. Introduction: Philosophy of the People.- 2. Nature and Nature.- 3. Emerson and Peirce.- 4. The Crack in Everything: Emerson and Zizek on the Dialectical Nature of Philosophy and the World.- 5. Evolutionary Existentialism of Emerson and Paz.- 6. Postmodern Emerson and the Sorites of Ethical Difference: Emerson and Irigaray.- 7. Emerson and Beauvoir: Seriousness as a Form of Clutching.- 8. Emerson and Heidegger on Thinking.- 9. Emerson and Rorty: Baring and Bearing Reality.- 10. Emerson and Derrida: Traces of Meanings, Genres without Borders.- 11. Emerson and Ta-Nehisi Coates: On the Ideas We Find Ourselves in and on the Way Out.- 12. Conclusion.
About the author
Richard Gilmore received his Ph. D. in Philosophy from The University of Chicago. He is the author of
Philosophical Health: Wittgenstein's Method in Philosophical Investigations (Lexington, 1999),
Doing Philosophy at the Movies (SUNY, 2005), and
Searching for Wisdom in Movies: From the Book of Job to Sublime Conversations (Palgrave, 2017). He is a Professor of Philosophy at Concordia College (USA).
