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2 books match the query 'Weinstein, Michael A.'

cover of Finite Perfection: Reflections on Virtue

Finite Perfection

Reflections on Virtue

Michael A. Weinstein

University of Massachusetts Press, 1985

A contemporary account of how virtue can have significance in a world that has lost the certainty of common and collective meanings.

Finite Perfection: Reflections on Virtue is a work of political philosophy and ethical theory in which Michael A. Weinstein develops a rigorous and original account of virtue grounded in the existentialist tradition rather than in classical metaphysics or theology. The book's title captures its central philosophical tension: where classical and religious traditions have often located virtue in relation to an infinite, divine, or transcendent standard of perfection, Weinstein insists on taking seriously the finitude of the human condition—the irreducible limits of time, mortality, and embodied existence—and asking what excellence and virtue can mean for beings who are, by nature, incomplete and bounded.

Weinstein's approach is rooted in the concept of the self-possessed individual—a person who has achieved a kind of integrity and mastery over themselves not through escape from finitude, but through honest acknowledgment and creative embrace of it. Virtue, on this view, is not a transcendence of human limitation but a perfecting of what is possible within it: the best a finite being can be. This framework draws productively on the existentialist tradition (particularly its emphasis on authenticity, self-creation, and the confrontation with mortality), while also engaging with the Aristotelian tradition of virtue ethics and the Nietzschean understanding of self-overcoming. 

Throughout its pages, Weinstein brings his characteristic intellectual breadth to bear, moving across political philosophy, ethics, and social theory to construct an account of virtue that is both philosophically rigorous and deeply humane. 

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cover of The Imaginative Prose of Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Imaginative Prose of Oliver Wendell Holmes

Michael A. Weinstein

University of Missouri Press, 2006

One of the most popular serious writers of the mid-nineteenth century, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., was a major figure of the New England Renaissance and wrote seven volumes of imaginative prose that were hybrids of essay and fiction. His four table-talk books initiated the form of the dramatized essay, and his three novels—styled as romances “medicated” by intellectual discourse—were among the first examples of ideologically didactic fiction.
            Michael A. Weinstein now traces Holmes’s intellectual trajectory across these works to show how his thought evolved over the course of his life and in response to America’s transition from an agrarian to an industrial society. Through close readings of this eclectic ouevre—including such lesser-known late works as A Mortal Antipathy and Over the Teacups—he offers a comprehensive interpretation of Holmes’s thought concerning the American national character, showing him to have had a far richer understanding of human experience than other scholars have previously supposed.
            This is the first book to consider Holmes’s imaginative prose as a whole and to defend its systematic structure against critics who have branded him a dilettante lacking system or seriousness. Through a careful explication of characters and themes, Weinstein finds at the core of these works a high regard for self-determination as a quintessential American value: an affirmation of the freedom of individuals to decide for themselves how to respond to a human condition that can be as perilous as it is promising. In the course of his analysis, Weinstein engages the spectrum of Holmes criticism and also shows how Holmes anticipated the cultural problems of modernity, pluralism, psychoanalysis, and existentialism, as well as postmodern literary expression.
            Through his insightful assessment, Weinstein gives us an author whose respect for individual judgment is as relevant in today’s society, torn by cultural politics, as it was in his own time. His book restores Holmes to his place in the canon while introducing a wider readership to a perceptive writer who offers not only insight into the moral possibilities of American identity but also genuine wit and wisdom about the art of living.
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