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Leon R. Kass has been helping Americans better understand the human
condition for over four decades as a teacher, writer, scholar,
public champion of the humanities, and defender of human dignity.
From bioethics to civic education, from interpreting the Bible to
weighing the moral implications of modern science, Kass has offered
wisdom, guidance, and instruction. In this volume, fifteen of
Kass's admirers, including students, colleagues, and friends, honor
his work by reflecting on the broad range of subjects to which he
has devoted his life's work. Some of the essays offer
interpretations of great works of literature and philosophy from
Homer, Sophocles, and Plato to Rousseau, Franklin, Jane Austen,
Hawthorne, and Henry James. Others examine the significance of Leon
Kass's work as a bioethicist and Chairman of the President's
Council on Bioethics and as an interpreter of the Book of Genesis.
The essays collected in Apples of Gold in Pictures of Silver offer
a sense of the breadth of Kass's interests and insights and of the
influence he has had on generations of scholars. The reader is
further acquainted with the career of Leon R. Kass by a
biographical introduction and a comprehensive listing of his
published writings and the courses he has taught."
Leon R. Kass has been helping Americans better understand the human
condition for over four decades as a teacher, writer, scholar,
public champion of the humanities, and defender of human dignity.
From bioethics to civic education, from interpreting the Bible to
weighing the moral implications of modern science, Kass has offered
wisdom, guidance, and instruction. In this volume, fifteen of
Kass's admirers, including students, colleagues, and friends, honor
his work by reflecting on the broad range of subjects to which he
has devoted his life's work. Some of the essays offer
interpretations of great works of literature and philosophy from
Homer, Sophocles, and Plato to Rousseau, Franklin, Jane Austen,
Hawthorne, and Henry James. Others examine the significance of Leon
Kass's work as a bioethicist and Chairman of the President's
Council on Bioethics and as an interpreter of the Book of Genesis.
The essays collected in Apples of Gold in Pictures of Silver offer
a sense of the breadth of Kass's interests and insights and of the
influence he has had on generations of scholars. The reader is
further acquainted with the career of Leon R. Kass by a
biographical introduction and a comprehensive listing of his
published writings and the courses he has taught."
Behind many of the hottest political issues of the current moment
-abortion, stem-cell research, Intelligent Design, Islamic
fundamentalism-stands a resurgence of the centuries-old contest
between religion and the Enlightenment. In such circumstances, a
volume of essays honoring the thought of Werner J. Dannhauser is
particularly timely. An expert on Nietzsche and Jewish political
thought, Dannhauser's abiding concern was the issue of "reason,
faith, and politics." Does secular rationalism, as promoted by the
Enlightenment, provide an adequate basis for moral and political
life? Or does the modern state ultimately require religious habits
and beliefs even while tending to undermine them? Is the emergence
of the religious right, then, a necessary and salutary phenomenon?
Or does it pose dangers to our liberal constitution and to minority
religious communities, such as Jews and Muslims? In short, is
Enlightenment rationalism helpful or harmful to social life? And is
Biblical religion necessary for or in tension with American liberal
democracy? Questions such as these, which have concerned Dannhauser
throughout a long scholarly career, have recently reemerged as
front-page issues. In addressing this theme, the eleven essays
comprising the present volume-by such scholars as Francis Fukuyama,
Walter Berns, Jeremy Rabkin, and Ralph Lerner-range widely over
Western intellectual history, from classical philosophy and ancient
Israel, to the Medieval period and the Renaissance, to Nietzsche,
and to contemporary neoconservative thought.
One sure fact of humanity is that we all cherish our opinions and
will often strongly resist efforts by others to change them.
Philosophers and politicians have long understood this, and
whenever they have sought to get us to think differently they have
often resorted to forms of camouflage that slip their unsettling
thoughts into our psyche without raising alarm. In this fascinating
examination of a range of writers and thinkers, Ralph Lerner offers
a new method of reading that detects this camouflage and offers a
way toward deeper understandings of some of history's most
important--and most concealed--messages. Lerner analyzes an
astonishing diversity of writers, including Francis Bacon, Benjamin
Franklin, Edward Gibbon, Judah Halevi, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham
Lincoln, Moses Maimonides, and Alexis de Tocqueville. He shows that
by reading their words slowly and naively, with wide-open eyes and
special attention for moments of writing that become
self-conscious, impassioned, or idiosyncratic, we can begin to see
a pattern that illuminates a thinker's intent, new messages
purposively executed through indirect means. Through these
experimental readings, Lerner shows, we can see a deep commonality
across writers from disparate times and situations, one that finds
them artfully challenging others to reject passivity and fatalism
and start thinking afresh.
In this elegant extended essay, Ralph Lerner concentrates on the
politics of enlightenment--the process by which those who sought to
set minds free went about their work. Eighteenth-century
revolutionaries in America and Europe, Lerner argues, found that a
revolution aimed at liberating bodies and minds had somehow to be
explained and defended. Lerner first investigates how the makers of
revolution sought to improve their public's aspirations and
chances. He pays particular attention to Benjamin Franklin, to the
tone and substance of revolutionaries' appeals on both sides of the
Atlantic, and to the preoccupations of first- and second-generation
enlighteners among the Americans. He then unfolds the art by which
later political actors, confronting the profound political,
constitutional, and social divisions of their own day, drew upon
and reworked their national revolutionary heritage. Lerner's
examination of the speeches and writings of Edmund Burke, Abraham
Lincoln, and Alexis de Tocqueville shows them to be masters of a
political rhetoric once closely analyzed by Plato and his medieval
student al-Farabi but now nearly forgotten.
Originally published in 1994.
A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the
latest in digital technology to make available again books from our
distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These
editions are published unaltered from the original, and are
presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both
historical and cultural value.
"In one fashion or another, the question with which this
introduction begins is a question for every serious reader of
Plato's Republic Of what use is this philosophy to me? Averroes
clearly finds that the Republic speaks to his own time and to his
own situation. . . . Perhaps the greatest use he makes of the
Republic is to understand better the shari'a itself. . . . It is
fair to say that in deciding to paraphrase the Republic, Averroes
is asserting that his world the world defined and governed by the
Koran can profit from Plato's instruction." from Ralph Lerner s
Introduction
An indispensable primary source in medieval political philosophy
is presented here in a fully annotated translation of the
celebrated discussion of the Republic by the twelfth-century
Andalusian Muslim philosopher, Abu'l-Walid Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Ibn
Rushd, also know by his his Latinized name, Averroes. This work
played a major role in both the transmission and the adaptation of
the Platonic tradition in the West. In a closely argued critical
introduction, Ralph Lerner addresses several of the most important
problems raised by the work."
Hailed as the Oxford English Dictionary of American constitutional
history, the print edition of The Founders' Constitution has proved
since its publication in 1987 to be an invaluable aid to all those
seeking a deeper understanding of one of our nation's most
important legal documents.
In this unique anthology, Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner draw
on the writings of a wide array of people engaged in the problem of
making popular government safe, steady, and accountable. The
documents included range from the early seventeenth century to the
1830s, from the reflections of philosophers to popular pamphlets,
from public debates in ratifying conventions to the private
correspondence of the leading political actors of the day.
These rich and varied materials are arranged, first, according to
broad themes or problems to which the Constitution of 1787 has made
a significant and lasting contribution. Then they are arranged by
article, section, and clause of the U.S. Constitution, from the
Preamble through Article Seven and continuing through the first
twelve Amendments.
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