As Wide as the World Is Wise

Reinventing Philosophical Anthropology
Erscheinungsjahr 2016
ISBN: 978-0-231-17828-0
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 272 Seiten, Format (B × H): 236 mm x 166 mm, Gewicht: 516 g

Philosophy and anthropology have long debated questions of difference: rationality versus irrationality, abstraction versus concreteness, modern versus premodern. What if these disciplines instead focused on the commonalities of human experience? Would this effort bring philosophers and anthropologists closer together? Would it lead to greater insights across historical and cultural divides?

In As Wide as the World Is Wise, Michael Jackson encourages philosophers and anthropologists to mine the space between localized and globalized perspectives, to resolve empirically the distinctions between the one and the many and between specific forms of life and life itself. His project balances remote, epistemological practice with immanent reflection, promoting a more situated, embodied, and sensuous approach to the world and its in-between spaces. Drawing on a lifetime of ethnographic fieldwork in West Africa and Aboriginal Australia, Jackson resets the language and logic of academic thought from the standpoint of other lifeworlds. He extends Kant's cosmopolitan ideal to include all human societies, achieving a radical break with elite ideas of the subjective and a more expansive conception of truth.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Jackson, Michael

Jackson, Michael D.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Moderne Philosophische Disziplinen Philosophische Anthropologie

Über Autor(innen)

Michael Jackson is Distinguished Professor of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. He is the author of the prize-winning Paths Toward a Clearing (1989) and At Home in the World (2000). His most recent books include Between One and One Another (2012); Lifeworlds: Essays in Existential Anthropology (2012); The Other Shore: Essays on Writers and Writing (2012); and Harmattan: A Philosophical Fiction (Columbia, 2015).