This book brings together a team of international scholars to attempt to understand David Hume's conception of the self. The standard interpretation is that he holds a no-self view: we are just bundles of conscious experiences, thoughts and emotions. There is nothing deeper to us, no core, no essence, no soul. In the Appendix to A Treatise of Human Nature, though, Hume admits to being dissatisfied with such an account and Part One of this book explores why this might be so. Part Two turns to Books 2 and 3 of the Treatise, where Hume moves away from the 'fiction' of a simple self, to the complex idea we have of our flesh and blood selves, those with emotional lives, practical goals, and social relations with others. In Part Three connections are traced between Hume and Madhyamaka Buddhism, Husserl and the phenomenological tradition, and contemporary cognitive science.

This book is the first devoted to Hume's conception of testimony. Hume is usually taken to be a reductionist with respect to testimony, with trust in others dependent on the evidence possessed by individuals concerning the reliability of texts or speakers. This account is taken from Hume's essay on miracles in An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. O'Brien, though, looks wider than the miracles essay, turning to what Hume says about testimony in the Treatise, the moral Enquiry, the History of England and his Essays. There are social aspects of testimonial exchanges that cannot be explained purely in terms of the assessment of the reliability of testifiers. Hume's conception of testimony is integrated with his account of how history informs our knowledge of human nature, the relation between sympathy and belief and between pride and the conception we have of our selves, the role played by social factors in the judgment of intellectual virtue, and the importance Hume places on epistemic responsibility and the moral and personal dimensions of testimonial trust. It is not possible to focus on testimony without allowing other aspects of our nature into the frame and therefore turning also to consider sympathy, wisdom, history, morality, virtue, aesthetic judgment, the self, and character. O'Brien argues that Hume's reliance on the social goes deep and that he should therefore be seen as an anti-reductionist with respect to testimony. Hume on Testimony will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working on Hume and on early modern and contemporary approaches to the epistemology of testimony.

The main and original contribution of this volume is to offer a discussion of teleology through the prism of religion, philosophy and history. The goal is to incorporate teleology within discussions across these three disciplines rather than restrict it to one as is customarily the case. The chapters cover a wide range of topics, from individual teleologies to collective ones; ideas put forward by the French aristocrat Arthur de Gobineau and the Scottish philosopher David Hume, by the Anglican theologian and founder of Methodism, John Wesley, and the English naturalist Charles Darwin.

The Irish and the Jews are two of the classic outliers of modern Europe. Both struggled with their lack of formal political sovereignty in the nineteenth-century. Simultaneously European and not European, both endured a bifurcated status, perceived as racially inferior and yet also seen as a natural part of the European landscape. Both sought to deal with their subaltern status through nationalism; both had a tangled, ambiguous, and sometimes violent relationship with Britain and the British Empire; and both sought to revive ancient languages as part of their drive to create a new identity. The career of Irish politician Robert Briscoe and the travails of Leopold Bloom are just two examples of the delicate balancing of Irish and Jewish identities in the first half of the twentieth century. Irish Questions and Jewish Questions explores these shared histories, covering several centuries of the Jewish experience in Ireland, as well as events in Israel-Palestine and North America. The authors examine the leading figures of both national movements to reveal how each had an active interest in the successes, and failures, of the other. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars from the fields of Irish studies and Jewish studies, this volume captures the most recent scholarship on their comparative history with nuance and remarkable insight.

The main and original contribution of this volume is to offer a discussion of teleology through the prism of religion, philosophy and history. The goal is to incorporate teleology within discussions across these three disciplines rather than restrict it to one as is customarily the case. The chapters cover a wide range of topics, from individual teleologies to collective ones; ideas put forward by the French aristocrat Arthur de Gobineau and the Scottish philosopher David Hume, by the Anglican theologian and founder of Methodism, John Wesley, and the English naturalist Charles Darwin.

Dan O'Brien's gripping and provocative play, The Body of an American speaks to a moment in recent history when a single, stark photograph - of the body of an American dragged from the wreck of a Blackhawk through the streets of Mogadishu - reshaped the course of global events. In a story ranging far in time and place, from Rwanda to Afghanistan to the Canadian Arctic, and in powerful, theatrical language, Dan O'Brien explores the ethical and personal consequences of Paul Watson's photogra

A lapsed academic haunted by her past, and by an ambiguous angel, in the backwoods of the American South; a Midwestern widower dreams of returning to the Ireland of his youth; a heartsick cabbie auditions for his ex in a pub-theatre in Cork City; a schizophrenic grapples for freedom from the mother in his mind; three voices of the COVID-19 pandemic seek long-distance resolution and reunion. In these and other monologues, selected from over two decades of work, award-winning American playwright Dan O'Brien illuminates, in heartbreaking and unwavering fashion, the humanity of lost souls longing to be heard. "Dan O'Brien is a playwright-poet who, like a mash-up of Seamus Heaney and Dashiel Hammett, puts the audience in the middle of an unfolding mystery promising both revelation and terror, and delivering an equal measure of both." Robert Schenkkan "O'Brien is an outstanding wordsmith and a sharp observer of character." Variety "emotionally gripping, psychologically astute...a bracing and absorbing piece of theater." New York Times (Critics' Pick) on The Body of an American "A masterpiece of truthfulness and feeling" The Guardian on War Reporter "utterly riveting...frequently exhilarating" The Washington Post on The Body of an American

True Story: A Trilogy gathers together three documentary plays by award-winning playwright and poet Dan O’Brien concerning trauma, both political and personal. The Body of an American speaks to a moment in history when a single, stark photograph—of a US Army Ranger dragged from the wreckage of a Blackhawk helicopter through the streets of Mogadishu—altered the course of global events. In a story that ranges from Rwanda to Afghanistan to the Canadian Arctic, O’Brien dramatizes the ethical and psychological haunting of journalist Paul Watson. In The House in Scarsdale: A Memoir for the Stage the playwright applies journalistic principles to investigating the source of his childhood unhappiness, as he searches for the reason why his parents and siblings cut him off years ago. The more he learns about his family, the more mysterious the circumstances surrounding their estrangement become, until his sense of self is shaken by rumors regarding his true parentage. The trilogy concludes with New Life, a tragicomedy that finds Paul Watson in Syria and the playwright in treatment for cancer, while together they endeavor to sell a TV series about journalists in war zones. New Life explores the paradox of war as entertainment, and dares to dream of healing after catastrophe. These three gritty yet poetic plays stand as a testament to the value of witnessing, honoring, and perhaps transcending the struggles of living.

In Scarsdale Dan O'Brien applies to his own early life the same honesty and insight that were evident in his prize-winning War Reporter. Growing up in a family scarred by past trauma, he makes a bid for freedom - `in love with myself and this young stray's life' - only to be pulled back into the orbit of the place he had sought to escape. Gradually, possibilities for a more lasting change unfold.

Drawing on O'Brien's experience of cancer and of childhood abuse, and on his ongoing collaboration with a war reporter, the four essays in A Story that Happens--first written as craft lectures for the Sewanee Writers' Conference and the US Air Force Academy--offer hard-won insights into what stories are for and the reasons why, afraid and hopeful, we begin to tell them.

For twenty years Dan O’Brien struggled to make ends meet on his cattle ranch in South Dakota. But when a neighbor invited him to lend a hand at the annual buffalo roundup, O’Brien was inspired to convert his own ranch, the Broken Heart, to buffalo. Starting with thirteen calves, “short-necked, golden balls of wool,” O’Brien embarked on a journey that returned buffalo to his land for the first time in more than a century and a half.

Buffalo for the Broken Heart is at once a tender account of the buffaloes’ first seasons on the ranch and an engaging lesson in wildlife ecology. Whether he’s describing the grazing pattern of the buffalo, the thrill of watching a falcon home in on its prey, or the comical spectacle of a buffalo bull wallowing in the mud, O’Brien combines a novelist’s eye for detail with a naturalist’s understanding to create an enriching, entertaining narrative.

A collection of prose poems that chronicles the family life of two cancer survivors. Dan O’Brien’s powerful companion to Our Cancers catalogs the recovery of a cancer survivor, whose wife has recently survived her own cancer, as he returns to his daily life while raising a young daughter. This prose-poem sequence is a true survivor’s notebook, using photos and the tools of memoir to evoke how disaster can constellate our past, present, and future. In his poems, plays, and nonfiction, Dan O’Brien has explored, as he says in a 2023 interview, “how trauma shatters identity, and in its aftermath we reconfigure and rewrite, as it were, the story of who we were and are and maybe will be.� In highly personal poems reminiscent of dramatic monologues, as well as shorter lyric fragments, the protagonist reconsiders the people and places he knew before his illness, including his estranged family and others with cancer. While looking back he moves forward again, resuming his career as a writer and teacher, revisiting Ireland, and making a kind of pilgrimage to the Holy Land. There is a confiding and at times comical tone in these poems as O’Brien awakens to the delights, absurdities, and wonders of existence, and as he and his wife work through the aftershocks of their trauma toward a deeper love. With text and image, Survivor’s Notebook shows how we go on, with resilience, gratitude, and joy, when “the emergency’s elsewhere� now.

A Project of the Center for Great Plains Studies and the School of Natural Resources, University of Nebraska Great Plains Bison traces the history and ecology of this American symbol from the origins of the great herds that once dominated the prairie to its near extinction in the late nineteenth century and the subsequent efforts to restore the bison population. A longtime wildlife biologist and one of the most powerful literary voices on the Great Plains, Dan O'Brien has managed his own ethically run buffalo ranch since 1997. Drawing on both extensive research and decades of personal experience, he details not only the natural history of the bison but also its prominent symbolism in Native American culture and its rise as an icon of the Great Plains. Great Plains Bison is a tribute to the bison's essential place at the heart of the North American prairie and its ability to inspire naturalists and wildlife advocates in the fight to preserve American biodiversity.

From Scarsdale is an evocative and lyrical memoir of a haunted childhood in Scarsdale, New York. With a cancer diagnosis in his early forties, the author is compelled to revisit and resolve the mystery of his family's sadness. The fourth of six children in an Irish-American household distinctly out-of-place in this affluent suburb of New York City, O'Brien grows up in a claustrophobic milieu of secrecy, lies, and mental illness. The turning point in his maturation is an older brother's attempted suicide -- an event he witnesses firsthand. From Scarsdale traces with sensitivity the complex histories and dynamics that lead to this trauma, as O'Brien investigates the psychologies of his parents, themselves the survivors of painful childhoods in Scarsdale. Then, simultaneously disturbed and catalyzed by his brother's depression, and his own developing obsessive-compulsive disorder, the adolescent O'Brien discovers literature and the theatre as an escape, though it will take years for an actual liberation to occur. In many ways this memoir is that liberation, as his ambition here has been to tell "the story of who I am and where I'm from, with honesty, insight, and something like forgiveness. To try to leave the old place behind." With the specificity and aching affection of William Maxwell's Ancestors, and the impressionistic, mosaic-like structure of Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family, this book's subject is ultimately, like all memoir, the solace and the conundrum of memory. From Scarsdale is a rare book, uniquely told, and a poignant example of the redemptive power of a true story.

On the fourteenth anniversary of 9/11-an event that caused their downtown apartment to become "suffused with the World Trade Center's carcinogenic dust"-Dan O'Brien's wife discovers a lump in her breast. Surgery and chemotherapy soon follow, and on the day of his wife's final infusion, O'Brien learns of his own diagnosis. He has colon cancer and will need to undergo his own intensive treatment over the next nine months. Our Cancers is a compelling account of illness and commitment, of parenthood and partnership. This spare and powerful sequence creates an intimate mythology that seeks meaning in illness while also celebrating of the resilience of sufferers, caregivers, and survivors. As O'Brien explains in an introduction, "The consecutiveness of our personal disasters, with a daughter not yet two years old at the start of it, was shattering and nearly silencing. At hospital bedsides, in hospital beds myself, and at home through the cyclical assaults of our therapies, these poems came to me in fragments, as if my unconscious were attempting to reassemble our lives, our identities and memories . . . as if I were in some sense learning how to speak again."

The following account of my time spent between March 26th, 2008 and March 29th, 2010 is mostly factual, with occasional lapses into poetic license or vituperative anger. Humor is pursued wherever possible to ease the pain of incarceration without losing the message that "crime does not pay"--Goldman/Sachs, Bank of America, or your person or institution of choice notwithstanding. A Special Thanks to Karrie Nitsche for a beautiful cover.

Hanz Kreiger is not even fifteen years old, and death surrounds him at the Manor House at which he works as an indentured servant in Amsterdam. The maid, two stable boys, an ambassador to the court, and the cook have all just died.

It's the end of the Dark Ages, and the plague is sweeping across Europe. Hanz doesn't think his life can get much worse, but when his mum dies, it does. Having no other choice, Hanz leaves Amsterdam with Count Ipolito, who tells him that his days as an indentured servant are over.

Ipolito becomes a father figure for Hanz, but he is also dead in little more than a year. Now in Venice, Hanz finds himself with a manor, a horse, a dagger, money, and a business he knows nothing about.

It isn't long before Hanz ventures out on the road once again, and his journey will take him farther and last longer than he could have ever imagined. Join him as he discovers wonders and meets an odd array of people on his way to becoming one of the first renaissance men in Hanz Kreiger: Sojourner in the Time of Plague.