BiblioVault - Books about Humanism

The Later Works of John Dewey, Volume 5, 1925 - 1953

1929-1930, Essays, The Sources of a Science of Education, Individualism, Old and New, and Construction and Criticism

John Dewey. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston

Southern Illinois University Press, 2008

With the exception of The Quest for Certainty (Volume 4) this fifth volume brings together Dewey’s writings for the 1929–1930 period.

During this time Dewey published 4 books and 50 articles on philosophical, educational, political, and social issues. His philosophical essays include “What Humanism Means to Me” and “What I Believe,” both of which express Dewey’s faith in man’s potentialities and intelligence, and a lively Journal of Philosophy exchange with Ernest Nagel, William Ernest Hocking, C. I. Lewis, and F. J. E. Woodbridge. Educational writings include The Sources of a Science of Education. The contents of this volume reflect Dewey’s increasing involvement in social and political problems.

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The Legacy of Edward W. Said

William V. Spanos

University of Illinois Press, 2008

With the untimely death of Edward W. Said in 2003, various academic and public intellectuals worldwide have begun to reassess the writings of this powerful oppositional intellectual. Figures on the neoconservative right have already begun to discredit Said’s work as that of a subversive intent on slandering America’s benign global image and undermining its global authority. On the left, a significant number of oppositional intellectuals are eager to counter this neoconservative vilification, proffering a Said who, in marked opposition to the “anti-humanism” of the great poststructuralist thinkers who were his contemporaries--Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, and Michel Foucault--reaffirms humanism and thus rejects poststructuralist theory.

In this provocative assessment of Edward Said’s lifework, William V. Spanos argues that Said’s lifelong anti-imperialist project is actually a fulfillment of the revolutionary possibilities of poststructuralist theory. Spanos examines Said, his legacy, and the various texts he wrote--including Orientalism,Culture and Imperialism, and Humanism and Democratic Criticism--that are now being considered for their lasting political impact.

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Lessons of the Masters

George Steiner

Harvard University Press, 2003

When we talk about education today, we tend to avoid the rhetoric of "mastery," with its erotic and inegalitarian overtones. But the charged personal encounter between master and disciple is precisely what interests George Steiner in this book, a sustained reflection on the infinitely complex and subtle interplay of power, trust, and passions in the most profound sorts of pedagogy. Based on Steiner's Norton Lectures on the art and lore of teaching, Lessons of the Masters evokes a host of exemplary figures, including Socrates and Plato, Jesus and his disciples, Virgil and Dante, Heloise and Abelard, Tycho Brahe and Johann Kepler, the Baal Shem Tov, Confucian and Buddhist sages, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, Nadia Boulanger, and Knute Rockne.

Pivotal in the unfolding of Western culture are Socrates and Jesus, charismatic masters who left no written teachings, founded no schools. In the efforts of their disciples, in the passion narratives inspired by their deaths, Steiner sees the beginnings of the inward vocabulary, the encoded recognitions of much of our moral, philosophical, and theological idiom. He goes on to consider a diverse array of traditions and disciplines, recurring throughout to three underlying themes: the master's power to exploit his student's dependence and vulnerability; the complementary threat of subversion and betrayal of the mentor by his pupil; and the reciprocal exchange of trust and love, of learning and instruction between master and disciple.

Forcefully written, passionately argued, Lessons of the Masters is itself a masterly testament to the high vocation and perilous risks undertaken by true teacher and learner alike.

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Life of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Oration

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

Harvard University Press, 2022

The Oration by philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), to which later editors added the subtitle On the Dignity of Man, is the most famous text written in Italy at the height of the Renaissance. The Life of Giovanni by Gianfrancesco Pico, his nephew, is the only contemporary account of the philosopher’s brief and astonishing career—Giovanni, who challenged anyone to debate him on nine hundred theses in Rome, whose writings made him a heretic by papal declaration, died at the age of thirty-one. Together, these works record Giovanni’s invention of Christian Kabbalah, his search for the ancient theology of Orpheus and Zoroaster, and his effort to reconcile all the warring schools of philosophy in universal concord. In this new translation, the two texts are presented with ample explanatory notes that transform our understanding of these fascinating thinkers.

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