Michael Eskin

A new ethic for thinking and being -- Situation -- Pressure points -- Fear -- Through a glass, darkly -- Yoga for the mind -- The fourteen poses -- Practicing yoga for the mind -- Meridians of thought -- Slow thought -- Philosophical thinking is yoga for the mind -- Meridians of thought: mapping the pathways of thinking -- The body and the five meridians of thought -- The meridians of thought: The thoughtractys -- The five meridians of thought: distinction, perspective, relation, movement, sense.

Literary Nonfiction. Essay. Philosophy. Personal Growth. Spirituality. A sheer delight to read and think along with, these aphorisms and philosophical miniatures will astound, enliven, and inspire anyone ready and willing to risk a fresh, unflinching look at the world, humanity, and the often curious ways in which we think, act, and feel...Like truffles that gradually dissolve on our tongue, suffusing us with the gustatory memory of their transient shape and texture, and leaving us desiring more.

Avowedly polemical, without a single footnote, and aiming at the educated, non-academic or academic, reader, this short and punchy book - a manifesto, manual of instruction, and inspirational romp through the history of philosophy - argues that what we typically take to be 'philosophy' these days is actually not philosophy in the strong or 'true' sense at all, but a mix of intellectual history, the history of philosophy, philosophical scholarship, and 'academic' philosophy. More specifically, I elaborate, by way of a plethora of examples culled from across the history of philosophy, how "authentically philosophical" writing (as opposed to its academic-scholarly-historical-philosophical counterpart) works, making a pedagogical-institutional recommendation for the creation of what I envision as MFT (Master of Fine Thought) programs in the process.

Ethics and Dialogue engages with four of the most complex authors of the twentieth century--Levinas, Bakhtin, Mandel'shtam, and Celan--in a hermeneutically and methodologically innovative manner. Construing Levinas's ethical philosophy in conjunction with Bakhtin's philosophy of the act and metalinguistics, as an interpretative framework for making sense of Celan's dialogue with Mandel'shtam, the author develops a highly sophisticated mode of reading poetry--poethics--which takes into account both the ethical significance of poetry and the poetic significance of ethical philosophy. While documenting the viability of Levinas's and Bakhtin's philosophies, Eskin's analyses of Celan's and Mandel'shtam's poetry in the light of its philosophical underpinnings open hitherto unseen vistas on to the workings of twentieth-century poetry in general and on to European modernist and post-World War II poetry in particular.

This study deals with the writings of Emmanuel Levinas, Mikhail Bakhtin, Osip Mandelshtam, and Paul Celan in light of the authors' shared concern with the transcendental significance of dialogue as a complex dynamics of interpellation, response, and responsibility. Beginning from the stipulation of dialogue as a fundamental, multi-layered moment in the make-up of human reality, it investigates its ethico-existential underpinnings and its enactment in and through poetry. Levinas's, Bakhtin's, Mandelshtam's, and Celan's writings reveal themselves as dialogically complementary: while Levinas and Bakhtin describe and theorize the ethical and existential foundations of dialogue, respectively, Mandelshtam and Celan poetically enact dialogue, thereby demonstrating, as it were, both the viability of Levinas's and Bakhtin's claims and the transformative power of poetry as a socio-politically exemplary practice. The elaboration of the authors' dialogic interdependence involves extensive discussions of Levinas's ethics with particular attention to its semiotic structure, Bakhtin's philosophy of the act with particular attention to its relation to metalinguistics, Mandelshtam's and Celan's poetics with particular attention to the poets' respective emphases on dialogue, and, finally, Celan's Mandelshtam translations and original poetry with particular attention to the cycle Die Niemandsrose. The concomitant engagement of Levinas, Bakhtin, Mandelshtam, and Celan necessitates the development of poethics, which captures both Celan's particular mode of responding to Mandelshtam and the interpreter's own idiosyncratic approach to the four authors as a form of criticism