Care Crosses the River

Care Crosses the River PDF Author: Hans Blumenberg
Publisher: Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics
ISBN: 9780804735803
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In this accessible collection of short meditations on various topics, Blumenberg works as a detective of ideas scouring the periphery of intellectual and philosophical history for clues--metaphors, gestures, anecdotes--essential to grasping human finitude.

Care Crosses the River

Care Crosses the River PDF Author: Hans Blumenberg
Publisher: Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics
ISBN: 9780804735803
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In this accessible collection of short meditations on various topics, Blumenberg works as a detective of ideas scouring the periphery of intellectual and philosophical history for clues--metaphors, gestures, anecdotes--essential to grasping human finitude.

Shipwreck With Spectator

Shipwreck With Spectator PDF Author: Hans Blumenberg
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262024112
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
This elegant essay exemplifies Blumenberg's ideas about the ability of the historical study of metaphor to illuminate essential aspects of being human. Originally published in the same year as his monumental Work on Myth, Shipwreck with Spectator traces the evolution of the complex of metaphors related to the sea, to shipwreck, and to the role of the spectator in human culture from ancient Greece to modern times. The sea is one of humanity's oldest metaphors for life, and a sea journey, Blumenberg observes, has often stood for our journey through life. We all know the role that shipwrecks can play in this journey, and at some level we have all played witness to others' wrecks, standing in safety and knowing that there is nothing we can do to help, yet fixed comfortably or uncomfortably in our ambiguous role as spectator. Through Blumenberg's seemingly inexhaustible knowledge of letters, from ancient texts through nineteenth-century reminiscences and modern speeches, we see layer upon layer revealed in the meanings humans have given to these metaphors; and in this way we begin to understand what metaphors can do that more straightforward modes of expression cannot. This edition of Shipwreck with Spectator also includes "Prospect for a Theory of Nonconceptuality", an essay that recounts the evolution of Blumenberg's ideas about metaphorology in the years following his early manifesto "Paradigms for a Metaphorology".

Paradigms for a Metaphorology

Paradigms for a Metaphorology PDF Author: Hans Blumenberg
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 080147695X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
What role do metaphors play in philosophical language? Are they impediments to clear thinking and clear expression, rhetorical flourishes that may well help to make philosophy more accessible to a lay audience, but that ought ideally to be eradicated in the interests of terminological exactness? Or can the images used by philosophers tell us more about the hopes and cares, attitudes and indifferences that regulate an epoch than their carefully elaborated systems of thought? In Paradigms for a Metaphorology, originally published in 1960 and here made available for the first time in English translation, Hans Blumenberg (1920-1996) approaches these questions by examining the relationship between metaphors and concepts. Blumenberg argues for the existence of "absolute metaphors" that cannot be translated back into conceptual language. "Absolute metaphors" answer the supposedly naïve, theoretically unanswerable questions whose relevance lies quite simply in the fact that they cannot be brushed aside, since we do not pose them ourselves but find them already posed in the ground of our existence. They leap into a void that concepts are unable to fill. An afterword by the translator, Robert Savage, positions the book in the intellectual context of its time and explains its continuing importance for work in the history of ideas.

The Readability of the World

The Readability of the World PDF Author: Hans Blumenberg
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501766627
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
The Readability of the World represents Hans Blumenberg's first extended demonstration of the metaphorological method he pioneered in Paradigms for a Metaphorology. For Blumenberg, metaphors are symptomatic of patterns of thought and feeling that escape conceptual formulation but are nonetheless indispensable, because they allow humans to orient themselves in an otherwise overwhelming world. The Readability of the World applies this method to the idea that the world presents itself as a book. The metaphor of the book of nature has been central to Western interpretations of reality, and Blumenberg traces the evolution of this metaphor from ancient Greek cosmology to the model of the genetic code to access the different expectations of reality that it articulates, reflects, and projects. Writing with equal authority on literature and science, theology and philosophy, ancient metaphysics and twentieth-century biochemistry, Blumenberg advances rich and original interpretations of the thinking of a range of canonical figures, including Berkeley, Vico, Goethe, Spinoza, Leibniz, Bacon, Flaubert, and Freud. Through his interdisciplinary, anthropologically sharpened gaze, Blumenberg uncovers a wealth of new insights into the continuities and discontinuities across human history of the longing to contain all of nature, history, and reality in a book, from the Bible, the Talmud, and the Qur'an to Diderot's Encyclopedia and Humboldt's Cosmos to the ACGT of the DNA code.

The Genesis of the Copernican World

The Genesis of the Copernican World PDF Author: Hans Blumenberg
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262022675
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 838

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Book Description
This major work by the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg is a monumental rethinking of the significance of the Copernican revolution for our understanding of modernity.

Work on Myth

Work on Myth PDF Author: Hans Blumenberg
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262521334
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 727

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Book Description
In this rich examination of how we inherit and transform myths, Hans Blumenberg continues his study of the philosophical roots of the modern world. Work on Myth is in five parts. The first two analyze the characteristics of myth and the stages in the West's work on myth, including long discussions of such authors as Freud, Joyce, Cassirer, and Valéry. The latter three parts present a comprehensive account of the history of the Prometheus myth, from Hesiod and Aeschylus to Gide and Kafka. This section includes a detailed analysis of Goethe's lifelong confrontation with the Prometheus myth, which is a unique synthesis of "psychobiography" and history of ideas. Work on Myth is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.

Crazy River

Crazy River PDF Author: Richard Grant
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439157642
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
From the acclaimed author of Dispatches From Pluto and Deepest South of All comes a rollicking travelogue from East Africa. NO ONE TRAVELS QUITE LIKE RICHARD GRANT and, really, no one should. In his last book, the adventure classic God’s Middle Finger, he narrowly escaped death in Mexico’s lawless Sierra Madre. Now, Grant has plunged with his trademark recklessness, wit, and curiosity into East Africa. Setting out to make the first descent of an unexplored river in Tanzania, he gets waylaid in Zanzibar by thieves, whores, and a charismatic former golf pro before crossing the Indian Ocean in a rickety cargo boat. And then the real adventure begins. Known to local tribes as “the river of bad spirits,” the Malagarasi River is a daunting adversary even with a heavily armed Tanzanian crew as travel companions. Dodging bullets, hippos, and crocodiles, Grant finally emerges in war-torn Burundi, where he befriends some ethnic street gangsters and trails a notorious man-eating crocodile known as Gustave. He concludes his journey by interviewing the dictatorial president of Rwanda and visiting the true source of the Nile. Gripping, illuminating, sometimes harrowing, often hilarious, Crazy River is a brilliantly rendered account of a modern-day exploration of Africa, and the unraveling of Grant’s peeled, battered mind as he tries to take it all in.

Travels of William Bartram

Travels of William Bartram PDF Author: William Bartram
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486138666
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 470

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Book Description
First inexpensive, illustrated edition of early classic on American geography, plants, Indians, wildlife, early settlers. Influenced Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Chateaubriand. "A book of extraordinary beauty." — The New York Times. 13 illustrations.

Bloody River Blues

Bloody River Blues PDF Author: Jeffery Deaver
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743424026
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
From Jeffery Deaver, New York Times bestselling author of The Empty Chair and The Devil's Teardrop, comes his trademark "ticking-bomb suspense" (People) that explodes off the page in this heart-stopping thriller. Hard-living Hollywood location scout John Pellam found the perfect backwater Missouri town for shooting a retro gangster film. But when real bullets leave two people dead and one cop paralyzed, Pellam—an unwitting witness to the brutal hits—is suddenly the South’s most wanted man. The feds and local police want him to talk. Mob enforcers want him silenced. And a mysterious blonde just wants him. Trapped in a town full of sinister secrets and deadly deceptions, Pellam must focus on facing down a killer before his own story fades to black.

A Feathered River Across the Sky

A Feathered River Across the Sky PDF Author: Joel Greenberg
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1620405369
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
This beautifully written cautionary tale reveals how passenger pigeons have become extinct and how no series effort was made to protect this species that inspired awe in the likes of John James Audubon, Henry David Thoreau and James Fenimore Cooper until it was too late.