The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent

Author: Lionel Trilling
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466832142
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 753

Book Description
A landmark reissue of a great teacher's finest work Lionel Trilling was, during his lifetime, generally acknowledged to be one of the finest essayists in the English language, the heir of Hazlitt and the peer of Orwell. Since his death in 1974, his work has been discussed and hotly debated, yet today, when writers and critics claim to be "for" or "against" his interpretations, they can hardly be well acquainted with them, for his work has been largely out of print for years. With this re-publication of Trilling's finest essays, Leon Wieseltier offers readers of many new generations a rich overview of Trilling's achievement. The essays collected here include justly celebrated masterpieces--on Mansfield Park and on "Why We Read Jane Austen"; on Twain, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Isaac Babel; on Keats, Wordsworth, Eliot, Frost; on "Art and Neurosis"; and the famous Preface to Trilling's book The Liberal Imagination. This exhilarating work has much to teach readers who may have been encouraged to adopt simpler systems of meaning, or were taught to exchange the ideals of reason and individuality for those of enthusiasm and the false romance of group identity. Trilling's remarkable essays show a critic who was philosophically motivated and textually responsible, alive to history but not in thrall to it, exercised by art but not worshipful of it, consecrated to ideas but suspicious of theory.

The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent

Author: John Erskine
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American essays
Languages : en
Pages : 184

Book Description

The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent

Author: Lionel Trilling
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810124882
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 591

Book Description
The America of John Dos Passos -- Hemingway and his critics -- T.S. Eliot's politics -- The immortality ode -- Kipling -- Reality in America -- Art and neurosis -- Manners, morals, and the novel -- The Kinsey report -- Huckleberry Finn -- The Princess Casamassima -- Wordsworth and the Rabbis -- William Dean Howells and the roots of modern taste -- The poet as hero: Keats in his letters -- George Orwell and the politics of truth -- The situation of the American intellectual at the present time -- Mansfield Park -- Isaac Babel -- The morality of inertia -- "That smile of Parmenides made me think"--The last lover -- A speech on Robert Frost: a cultural episode -- On the teaching of modern literature -- The Leavis-Snow controversy -- The fate of pleasure -- James Joyce in his letters -- Mind in the modern world -- Art, will, and necessity -- Why we read Jane Austen.

The Moral Landscape

Author: Sam Harris
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 143917122X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Book Description
Sam Harris dismantles the most common justification for religious faith--that a moral system cannot be based on science.

Intelligent Disobedience

Author: Ira Chaleff
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
ISBN: 1626564280
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Book Description
Torture in Abu Ghraib prison. Corporate fraud. Falsified records at Veterans Administration hospitals. Teachers pressured to feed test answers to students. These scandals could have been prevented if, early on, people had said no to their higher-ups. Ira Chaleff discusses when and how to disobey inappropriate orders, reduce unacceptable risk, and find better ways to achieve legitimate goals. He delves into the psychological dynamics of obedience, drawing in particular on what Stanley Milgram's seminal Yale experiments-in which volunteers were induced to administer shocks to innocent people-teach us about how to reduce compliance with harmful orders. Using vivid examples of historical events and everyday situations, he offers advice on judging whether intelligent disobedience is called for, how to express opposition, and how to create a culture where citizens are educated and encouraged to think about whether orders make sense. --

The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent

Author: John Erskine
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 167

Book Description

The Moral Demands of Memory

Author: Jeffrey Blustein
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139470795
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 13

Book Description
Despite an explosion of studies on memory in historical and cultural studies, there is relatively little in moral philosophy on this subject. In this book, Jeffrey Blustein provides a systematic and philosophically rigorous account of a morality of memory. Drawing on a broad range of philosophical and humanistic literatures, he offers a novel examination of memory and our relations to people and events from our past, the ways in which memory is preserved and transmitted, and the moral responsibilities associated with it. Blustein treats topics of responsibility for one's own past; historical injustice and the role of memory in doing justice to the past; the relationship of collective memory to history and identity; collective and individual obligations to remember those who have died, including those who are dear to us; and the moral significance of bearing witness.

The Liberal Imagination

Author: Lionel Trilling
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590175514
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 339

Book Description
The Liberal Imagination is one of the most admired and influential works of criticism of the last century, a work that is not only a masterpiece of literary criticism but an important statement about politics and society. Published in 1950, one of the chillier moments of the Cold War, Trilling’s essays examine the promise —and limits—of liberalism, challenging the complacency of a naïve liberal belief in rationality, progress, and the panaceas of economics and other social sciences, and asserting in their stead the irreducible complexity of human motivation and the tragic inevitability of tragedy. Only the imagination, Trilling argues, can give us access and insight into these realms and only the imagination can ground a reflective and considered, rather than programmatic and dogmatic, liberalism. Writing with acute intelligence about classics like Huckleberry Finn and the novels of Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but also on such varied matters as the Kinsey Report and money in the American imagination, Trilling presents a model of the critic as both part of and apart from his society, a defender of the reflective life that, in our ever more rationalized world, seems ever more necessary—and ever more remote.

The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent

Author: John Erskine
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781546689980
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 174

Book Description
John Erskine, in his essay on The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent, has pointed out a most significant error in our stock moral ideals. Anglo-Saxon traditions have always tended to idealize moral courage, strength of will and of character, and to manifest a certain distrust of intelligence. In English literature the hero is so frequently portrayed as the courageous blunderer and the villain as the clever artificer. Witness Milton's Paradise Lost, Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice and other works, Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade," and the writings of Dickens and Thackeray. All this seems to be a product of the long struggle of our ancestors against nature in a rather severe climate, which necessitated largely self-reliance and will. This separation of goodness from intelligence is seen in our tendency to make a moral issue out of social evils because, as Erskine suggests, it seems humiliating to confess them a problem for intelligence. This in many respects resembles the Hebrew morality, which emphasized the "heart" in contrast with the Greek stress upon intellect. Erskine sees a hope in our assimilating the culture of other races, of which we should be more tolerant. We need to move our ethics away from the Hebrew and toward the Greek ideal .-- The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 23

Common Morality

Author: Bernard Gert
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198038720
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 203

Book Description
Distinguished philosopher Bernard Gert presents a clear and concise introduction to what he calls "common morality"--the moral system that most thoughtful people implicitly use when making everyday, common sense moral decisions and judgments. Common Morality is useful in that--while not resolving every disagreement on controversial issues--it is able to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable answers to moral problems.