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- No Folly in Howley's Book on Follies
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The Follies and Garden Buildings of Ireland
James Howley
Manufacturer: Yale University Press
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Shell Houses and Grottoes (Shire Album)
ASIN: 0300102259 |
Book Description
This entertaining and lovely book-the first to focus solely on follies and other garden buildings in Ireland-re-creates in word and image the wonder of these picturesque and fanciful architectural oddities.
Customer Reviews:
No Folly in Howley's Book on Follies.......2001-11-03
James Howley has done us a great service in writing about these unusual architectural sites in Ireland. We are surrounded by built things, but so many of them built with the severity of practical needs: domestic boxes, repetitive, hard-angled offices. His book reminds us that not all buildings were made so.
He educates us in these matters by maintaining scholarly momentum without sacrificing readability. Indeed, reading this book involves a curious deception -- you feel as though you have been tramping through the bushes all day and examining fascinating old buildings, then sitting tired but satisfied with a cup of tea, going over drawings and notes. Yet what has happened is that you have absorbed an array of both historical and social lessons.
Although the book is of course aimed at a specific area (Ireland) and specific topic (idiosyncratic buildings called 'follies'), the information is transferable into our daily lives. After having read the book, I found myself sensitized to the unusual in architecture in New England, where I live.
Qualifier: What we may think is unusual is not always a "folly" -- in glancing into the lifeways of our predecessors, we are looking with mystery into that which others saw as perfectly ordinary (a medieval castle privy may be to us a mysterious or amusing construction, although 800 years ago it was just a smelly crapper). In such cases, we need to educate ourselves in the definition of "unusual" and what it means for us and for the people of other ages.
Yet sometimes we find a truly unusual construction from whatever historical and local point of view you want to take. I drove by a yard in Shutesbury Massachusetts in which the owner had used his farm tractor to stack a series of huge flat stones on top of boulders to form a beautiful front-yard pyramid several feet high. My mind flashed instantly to the interesting people and odd places mentioned in Howley's book, and in this union of time and place and human dynamics, we see the ultimate practicality of this book. -- Wade Tarzia
Book Description
Every artist can capture the stunning beauty of the seasons with Tim Deibler at their side. He teaches readers how to understand light and truly see their subjects in step-by-step lessons that include:
* Ideas and exercises for mastering the four keys to any successful painting--shape, value, color and edges
* Side-by-side comparisons of the same scene painted in all four seasons
* Tip boxes in every section that provide quick and useful bites of information
* Five practical, hands-on strategies for starting any painting
It's never been easier for beginning and advanced landscape painters to make their work more captivating!
Customer Reviews:
The best companion for an artist.......2006-07-28
As a fine arts professional and art teacher, I've bought hundreds of drawing and painting books extracting the best.
In Tim Deibler's "Capturing the seasons in Oils"I have extracted almost all the parts of the book soo useful they are!
The book have treasures of basic and indispensable topics as in Chapter 1 "The four key elements of painting" - explaining Shape, Value, Color and Edge ( The edge part its wonderfully detailed).
In "Painting methods" Tim not only describes the techniques but shows the thing with terrific illustrations!
In "plein air painting" You have a fine selection of equipment and delightful titles as "I'm outside, Now what?"
On the last part of the book you have precious step by step demonstrations with detailed materials as paints,brushes and other supplies in little tips boxes.
A clear up to the beginners and the advanced!
If you buy this book I'm sure that by itself it will be your best companion and instructor for long long time !
EXCELLENT!.......2006-02-18
I have greatly enjoyed all the works by this artist. His instructional video of this title is right up there at the top of all art videos. I've never seen an artist paint so fast and loose, and tie it all together into such inspiring pieces. His mastery of color and how he does his mixing is exciting and quite unique. Never seen anything like it.
Worth every penny!!
Sloppy.......2006-01-29
Too Loose and sloppy
Tim's DVD by the same title is especially bad. The production is good but Tim's technique is quite sloppy even for quick studies.
Better choices would be "14 Formulas for Painting Fabulous Landscapes" by Barbara Nuss and "Painting Better Landscapes" by Margaret Kessler other notable publications by Gregg Kreutz, David Leffel and Richard Schmid would be a wise investment.
Beautiful and colorful.......2005-10-05
I was very inspired by the vibrant paintings in this book. This book has a compilation of a large number landscape paintings created by the author. The artist has demonstrated the steps required to create different effects and seasons using various techniques. Some more detail into these techniques would be excellent. For example, how to create the look of branches of trees against the bright sunlight.
A solid painter.......2005-02-16
OK so a lot of books by this publisher are kind of lightweight but this is a nice exception. Tim Deibler has a lot of painting and color knowledge and shares it in this book.
His palette is spare but he gets miles out of it. He really knows how to mix color and he brings a freshness to each work. He's not one of those painters that keeps repeating the same color formula.
This is a well done book with exceptional color reproductions.
Book Description
Combining technical mastery with emotional impact to create a powerful, evocative scene is the ultimate goal of every oil landscape painter. Painting Mood and Atmosphere in Oils, the second title in North Light's Land & Light Workshop series, helps painters achieve that goal with:
-13 step-by-step demonstrations covering a variety of subjects and scenes
-A practical, down-to-earth guide to the art of capturing emotion, including valuable tips on painting from memory and painting from photos
-Resourceful sections on oil painting basics, including brushwork, composition and color mixing
Painting Mood and Atmosphere in Oils will help readers paint the landscapes of their heart.
Customer Reviews:
Very useful.......2006-10-12
This book presents some fine instruction and some fine illustrative paintings. The best part, for me, is that Ms. Lewis shows many color mixtures used to achieve many of the specific colors shown in her paintings. You can learn from this book.
Book Description
Artists are intrigued by all that a workshop offers--one-on-one attention, a focused course of study and a knowledgeable instructor. This book offers a practical and stimulating alternative to the expense and inconvenience of conventional painting workshops, including:
* chapters organized like an actual week-long workshop
* first-hand instruction from a seasoned pro
* secrets to create fresh, bright colors and techniques for painting outdoors
* a dozen popular "paint-on demos" in which correct the author's common problems on student paintings
Customer Reviews:
How Does He Make a Living ?.......2007-04-11
In the opening of the book, the artist mentions that he dropped out of art classes because of his instructors. I think he should have continued his art classes. I don't know if his paintings are meant to be just illustrative and are not real representations of what he does because I've seen his work before and it's not comparable to what is in this book.
If I had to pay for his instructional teaching, then I would demand my money back. The only reason I haven't returned this book is that I misplaced the Amazon invoice and packing materials. In all honesty, I must say that my first oil painting I ever painted turned out better than anything this artist has in his book, and that was without any previous or prior knowledge, and I don't consider myself to be a great artist.
Painting is like common sense - you either have it, or you don't.
A small epiphany!.......2004-02-08
I have read a good number of books on painting and this one is head and shoulders above the rest. I experienced an immediate improvement in the quality of my painting after reading this book.
Some of the things I found valuable were Goerschner's explanation of how he achieves color harmony through the use of four "grays," the role of dynamic and static shapes in a composition, and his annotated "paint-on" critiques.
This book contains complete and well rounded instruction -- I can't recommend it enough!
It's just OK.......2002-10-03
It's more suitable for beginners. There is not much information. There are some good suggestions. The book title attracted me. It's pretty basic.
Finally -- a "freeing your creativity" book that works.......2002-01-07
I've been painting off and on for 50 years. This book is the best I've read, bar none, on how to free up your artistic creativity. I've read it through twice and keep it handy as a reference. The ideas within are expressed with simplicity and great skill, making the book a delight to read. The book is definitely a keeper. I highly recommend it for any serious oil or acrylic artist.
Energetic and Inspirational.......1999-12-05
I am using this book (along with Kevin Macpherson's "Fill Your Oil Paintings with Light and Color" and Charles Sovek's "Oil Painting -Develop Your Natural Ability") as a foundation for my self-directed study in oil painting.
Goershner's understanding of design and color, and his enthusiasm and clarity of teaching makes him a must-read for serious students of painting. My hope is to become as masterful as he is in his paintings: he manages to intrigue the viewer immediately, and uses superb compositional and color methods to elate and inspire, and leave the viewer wanting more.
Through step by step examples in the book, he explains why his paintings work so well, and how you can develop the same competence. I particularly enjoyed his critiques of 12 student paintings which he then improves and explains why they now look so much better. What a superb way to learn!
I've definitely become a Goershner fan and will be working with this book often.
Book Description
This addition to the Workshop series will show you how to use your paints to their best advantage. This simple and innovative guide makes oil painting achievable for everyone. Filled with practical step-by-step instructions, this portable guide guarantees success.
Book Description
A complete guide to all the materials, techniques and methods that you will need, and containing inspirational and practical projects to follow with expert ideas and advice on all the latest approaches.
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Getting Started in Oils (Artist's Workshop)
Brian Bagnall , and
Ursula Bagnall
Manufacturer: Walter Foster Publishing
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 1560101784 |
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Oils Still Life (Artist's Workshop)
Brian Bagnall , and
Ursula Bagnall
Manufacturer: Walter Foster Publishing
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 1560101814 |
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Harry Smith: Magic Moments
Harry Smith
Manufacturer: S. White Editions
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ASIN: 0960680802 |
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Inicie Su Negocio En Casa - Facil!
Barbara Weltman
Manufacturer: Prentice Hall Empresa
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ASIN: 9701700899 |
Book Description
Governments use them to sell everything from oilfields to pollution permits, and to privatize companies; consumers rely on them to buy baseball tickets and hotel rooms, and economic theorists employ them to explain booms and busts. Auctions make up many of the world's most important markets; and this book describes how auction theory has also become an invaluable tool for understanding economics.
Auctions: Theory and Practice provides a non-technical introduction to auction theory, and emphasises its practical application. Although there are many extremely successful auction markets, there have also been some notable fiascos, and Klemperer provides many examples. He discusses the successes and failures of the one-hundred-billion dollar "third-generation" mobile-phone license auctions; he, jointly with Ken Binmore, designed the first of these.
Klemperer also demonstrates the surprising power of auction theory to explain seemingly unconnected issues such as the intensity of different forms of industrial competition, the costs of litigation, and even stock trading 'frenzies' and financial crashes.
Engagingly written, the book makes the subject exciting not only to economics students but to anyone interested in auctions and their role in economics.
Customer Reviews:
Brilliant explanation of real-world auction theory.......2006-04-20
Paul Klemperer was the principal auction theorist advising the UK Government on the design of the 3G spectrum auction in 2000, which raised $34 billion, the biggest auction in history. In this book he reviews auction design both theoretically and in practice - the two perspectives turn out to be very different.
Chapter 1 is a survey of auction theory. The author begins by identifying four types of auction: the English type of open ascending bids, the Dutch auction using descending bids where the first bidder wins, the first-price sealed-bid auction where the highest bidder wins and pays their own bid price, and the second-price sealed-bid auction (the Vickrey auction) where the highest bidder wins, but pays the amount bid by the second-highest bidder. If the latter seems counter-intuitive, note that in the English auction, the winner also pays an amount set by the second-highest bidder (the last person to drop out). Note also that the Dutch auction and the first-price sealed-bid auction are equivalent.
Another important distinction is between private-value auctions, where each bidder has their own, invariant valuation of the object(s) being auctioned, and common-value auctions, where bidders might alter their valuations depending on signals (i.e. observed bids) made by other participants.
The key result in auction theory is the Revenue Equivalence Theorem, which states that all the standard auction methods, under certain plausible conditions, generate the same revenues. This accounts for the fact that no one method of conducting auctions has displaced all the others. However, practical considerations often favor one kind of auction design over another, and this is analyzed extensively later in the book.
Chapter 1 finishes with a mathematical appendix which proves some of the main results plus some questions (and answers) from the Oxford University MPhil economics examination.
Chapter 2 is titled `why every economist should learn some auction theory' and extends application of the theory to economic issues such as litigation models, wars of attrition, market crashes and trading frenzies, and Internet sales models.
Chapter 3 is a detailed guide to auction design. Auction theory is about mathematical models and their properties. Auctions in the real world are competitions where real money is at stake and any and all tactics will be employed to win. Critical tactics to `game' auctions include collusion between bidders to avoid bidding against each other therefore lowering prices for everyone, and predatory behavior, where weaker bidders are frightened off either before or during the auction, thereby clearing the field and closing the auction early. Examples are given of extraordinary behavior by bidders which succeeded in effectively wrecking auctions as revenue-generating vehicles. Klemperer analyses each of the four types of auction in the context of deterring such behavior and concludes that there is no one right answer: auction design is `horses for courses'.
Chapter 4, `using and abusing auction theory', is aimed at academic auction theorists seduced by the mathematics at the expense of real-world issues. Klemperer argues that `undergraduate economics', taking into account the concerns of industrial organisation (e.g. monopolistic, oligopolistic and perfectly competitive behaviours) are more central to successful auction design than some of the more `sophisticated' topics of the graduate-level theory. He also emphasises, with examples, that political realities can negate even the best auction design, if the designer is naive and doesn't take politics into account in advance.
Chapter 5 gives an overview of the European 3G spectrum auctions, which ranged from brilliantly successful to absolute disasters, while chapter 6 explains in great detail exactly how the UK auction (perhaps the most successful) was designed. This chapter is extremely insightful in indicating how many general economic intuitions have to be employed, over and above the specific insights of auction theory, to get a design which can resist the best efforts of the bidders to sabotage its effectiveness.
Chapter 7 analyses some of the more interesting and puzzling bidder strategies seen in the auctions, while chapter 8 is the reprinted Financial Times article, `were auctions a good idea', which defends the idea of auctions against special pleading by industry lobbyists that they had to pay too much, and that as a consequence the industry was wrecked. Not so.
Overall, this book succeeds in creating in the non-economist reader a sense that they understand the basic terrain of auctions - what they are about - although there is clearly a much deeper set of theoretical results underpinning this map of the territory. The chapters tend to be quite repetitive, but that can help offset Klemperer's use of jargon whenever he gets into conceptual analysis. It looks as though he doesn't know he's doing it, and that the people who reviewed it are his colleagues who use this stuff every day and didn't notice either. With a small amount of additional explanation to clarify the use of terms, much of the conceptual analysis would have been more accessible. The alternative is to read the book twice! Recommended.
Book Description
This digital document is an article from RAND Journal of Economics, published by Thomson Gale on March 22, 2006. The length of the article is 9681 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Sequential auctions: theory and evidence from the Seattle Fur Exchange.
Author: Val E. Lambson
Publication:
RAND Journal of Economics (Magazine/Journal)
Date: March 22, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 37
Issue: 1
Page: 70(11)
Distributed by Thomson Gale
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Oil lease auctions: Reconciling economic theory with practice (Mimeographs / Monash University. Centre of Policy Studies)
Mark S Robinson
Manufacturer: Monash University, Centre of Policy Studies
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding
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ASIN: B0007C3ZOY |
Book Description
A useful and breakneck tour of the perils of modernity. (Toronto Globe and Mail)
Customer Reviews:
for stimulation and fresh thinking.......2007-03-19
Gray's provocative essay is most valuable as stimulus and for questioning several increasingly `orthodox' presumptions about modernity and, secondarily, Al Qaeda (and nation states as well). Diverse reactions well reflect how he has gotten `under the skin' of varied readers and thinkers. Like many good essays this becomes a personal discourse for each thoughtful reader and may not be expected to achieve endorsement in toto by any one of them.
Al Qaeda is `modern' in its instruments from the internet and bank transfers to bombs. It reflects rather less than detractors wish that is in any way traditionally Islamic. Bin Laden has no training for Fatwas; old theories are warped to provide rationalization for what few Muslims believe to be Islamic; the real enemies are within the Muslim world but propped up by the "Far Enemy" in the West. Jihad is defensive not world conquest, attacking the foreign because it is so influential locally in the Muslim world not because of hatred for George's "our way of life". It is not a "clash of civilizations" satisfying and simplistic in its denial of Western political and economic interventions and totally blaming a medieval "other". There is logic to asymmetric warfare - perhaps more than response with an air force and occupation of Iraq.
Modernity is not a destination or even a journey but only a direction claiming logic and rationality belied by the realities of globalism, capitalism, and science.
Toleration is not uniquely western or modern but has ancient and Muslim roots as well. A most educated and democratic state of Germany elected Hitler. Labels obfuscate and provide excuses but not understanding. (See how some try to score points by calling Islamists "Islamo-fascist" at the very same time as describing medieval dark age mentality and rage.) Turkey is more secularist than the United States. Repressed religion encourages secular cults. Ironies and paradoxes can teach - or at least make us think freshly.
Market pricing, positivism, and the Enlightenment are but a few items grist for Gray's mill. He is both frustrating and provocative - but rarely dull.
A quotation from Wittgenstein reflects the premise that science and modernity do not have all the answers, "When all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain untouched." (page 110)
Modern horrors.......2006-03-01
Is the title of this book misleading? Clearly the emphasis of the book is on 'what it means to be modern' and 'Al Qaeda' is only used sparingly (but in my opinion very tellingly) to illustrate the main thesis. Thats not to say the title wont shift more copies with Al Qaeda in there, but if you're an intelligent and open-minded reader then you should come away from this book having been presented with a novel perspective on the modern world and having learnt something new, or at least a new argument, about the underlying nature and rational of a truly modern and global terrorist movement. Gray spends a lot of time arguing that Islamism is a product of a way of thinking that did not exist pre-enlightenment, and it seems most reviewers are focusing on this part of the argument. But to me, the more interesting (and convincing) arguments here concern al qaeda's existance as a product not only of modern thinking but of globalisation ie their ability to exploit failed states, global communications such as the internet, and of the international movement of people, money and arms. Thus the meaning of al qaeda is placed within the framework of the world view presented in 'straw dogs' - rather than technology and globablisation marching the world forwards into an era of democracy and peace, they will simply continue history along its usual course of conflict and suffering, only yet more bloodily
Some interesting ideas.......2005-04-17
Yes, plenty of the material in this book is simply stupid. But there are also some good points.
What are some aspects of modernity? Well, we're technologically better off than we were just a few centuries ago. And getting there has involved scholarship, progress, and cooperation. I think that recognizing that truth is an inherent value has sparked much of the progress. Now, truth can be used as one of the weapons in the arsenal of a tyrant, and it can result in acquiring the ability to cause more carnage in wars, but the triumph of Untruth would get rid of all the progress we've made.
The author discusses Positivism quite a bit, and I see no reason to do this. Positivism focuses on empirical truth, so it isn't the problem. We know empirically that people can make errors, so having faith that those who seek truth will be free from error is ill-advised. It seems to me that Gray is ready to attack and discard Positivism simply because it might lead to error. But that would also get rid of scholarship and progress.
Well, given all this, why am I giving this book a, um, positive review?
I think Gray does make a few interesting points. He does point out that Polytheistic Greece and Rome allowed for the fact that humans are varied, and did not insist on a single way to salvation. And he does point out that a Christian myth is precisely that there is one and only one way to salvation for everyone.
While I think Gray is attacking a ridiculous straw man to say that advances in science do not always advance humans socially, he's right about that. Still, I want to emphasize that his overall point seems wrong: if we were to address social problems in a more scholarly manner, I think we'd probably be better off, not worse off.
Now, what about al-Qaeda? Gray interprets it not so much as a blast from the past, populated by reactionaries representing a Dark Ages religion. Instead, he sees it more as an outgrowth of a more modern religious belief, shared by the German National Socialists, that our salvation lies in genocide. Perhaps that is an extreme way to put it, but this is approximately what Gray says. And I think there may be some truth to this. Maybe German extremism in the 1930s, along with its propaganda, ought to be compared more carefully with Islamist extremism today, along with its propaganda.
One final point that Gray makes is that there is a connection between terrorism and .... something. But what? Poverty? Despair? Bad karma? Gray looks at the question of failed states. Strong, stable, representative, and healthy states are less likely to sponsor terror, and they're certainly less likely to produce it. Gray thinks that the best environment for producing terror is semi-anarchy. We ought to think about that as well.
A new angle.......2004-09-29
As, once more, I am by far not the first to review this volume, and most worth saying has already been stated, let me just add a brief praise.
Gray has, once more, given us an excellent analysis of a highly pertinent issue. He invites us to take a look, from a very different and new angle when compared to mainstream media and authors, at fundamentalism, US policies, and globalisation in general.
To read this book is time well spent.
A failed hack job.......2004-08-08
This is a mercifully short book, an essay really, but ought to be much shorter. There are many broad points that I agreed with before reading this book, but Gray's hasty and loose arguments even for what I do agree with are just lousy.
I don't know if this is even worthy of being called a polemic, although it resembles one in its self-serving and highly selective historicism. It mainly seems to be a self-congratulatory rehash of his previous books (which I admit I haven't read) since a good third of his citations refer to them, wrapping up in a light-weight and curiously unironic defense of cultural relativism.
That said, I agree with the premise that al-Qaeda owes a direct debt to some enduring philosophical perversions of the Enlightenment. Whether this is a profound or superficial debt I'm not too sure. Whether it is an issue of resemblance, emulation, or some inevitability I haven't decided, but it doesn't appear Gray knows either. In fact, while reading this book I wasn't too clear on just what it is John Gray does know.
However, I do think it is clear that Gray knows very little about al-Qaeda. It also is clear that Gray knows just as little about the Enlightenment and about philosophy in general. "Superficial acquaintnance" with said topics is almost too generous. He seems to have some familiarity with modern economics, and I think many of his criticisms of a-historical economic theories is on the money. However, I felt he was mimicking Karl Polanyi's THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION, but there was no attribution. Actually, he was probably just regurgitating Stiglitz now that I think of it.
When it comes to al-Qaeda, we can ascertain that Gray picked up Ruthven's A FURY FOR GOD (which I highly recommend) once or twice, but that is it. As for a "modern" movement, it would at least be reasonable to familiarize oneself with the Islamic doctrines that play a role: Ibn Taymiyya's scholarship and Hanbali's legalism in particular. Why is it these thinkers, fairly obscure through much of Islam's history, suddenly have such a relevance to contemporary Islamist terrorism? There is a unique intersection of these minor schools, contemporary political conditions, and European philosophy that plays such an interesting role in al-Qaeda's philosophy. Beyond aping Ruthven in a brief discussion of Qutb (author of "The Neglected Duty" and MILESTONES), Gray is obviously unable to comment on such things. It is simplistic to argue al-Qaeda is a modern movement and leave it at that, as it is as equally insufficient to merely call them "fundamentalists," so I don't know what it is Gray thinks he is accomplishing.
Gray seems to see Russian anarchism of the late nineteenth century as the most relevant movement here, but it is unclear if he thinks the relationship to al-Qaeda is direct, analogous, ideological, aesthetic, or what. If he's just drawing a parallel, the force of his argument is weak. If he is drawing a direct philosophical thread between them, it requires a much more sophisticated historicism than Gray seems willing or able to indulge in. While associating an anti-state movement with a non-state group like al-Qaeda may be appealing, the connection is superficial at best, especially given those anarchist's radical individualism. The problem is that Gray doesn't understand Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment philosophy any better than he does al-Qaeda. Even the Russian nihilism of that period and the continental nihilism of German and French philosophy are incredibly distinctive. Thus Gray's indictment of the Enlightenment as a whole must do better than simply name drop its most prominent philosophers (Hume, Kant, Condorcet, etc.) and expect that to make the case for a totalitarian utopianism that al-Qaeda mimics.
From the footnotes, it seems that Gray relies on general histories and some favorite quotes from contemporary Enlightenment commentators for his views. Apart from maybe having read some Comte, there is little evidence that Gray is directly familiar with the philosophers he discusses.
For instance in a paragraph on the "Counter-Enlightenment" we get this: "Later in the nineteenth century, thinkers such as Fichte and Nietzsche glorified will over reason" (p. 25). Where to begin? First of all, Fichte was a contemporary of Kant, and wrote in the late eighteenth century. He was an early and avid roponent of enlightenment, not the other way around, and his philosophy of reason and will is obviously misunderstood by Gray. Fichte's radical idealism theorized that the will could not be legitimately restrained if the self is rational. The 'I' is absolute because of its rationality. Not only does Gray miss the boat on that (it's his only reference to Fichte), but it is with this Enlightenment philosopher that German nihilism, in its ultimately narcissistic and aesthetic dimensions, began. The relationship to al-Qaeda's aestheticized death worship is much clearer than to Russian nihilism's egalitarian dimensions(let alone to Logical Positivism and analytic philosophy for crying out loud). This is just for starters too (I won't even get into Nietzsche). The whole book is like this. He might as well have titled it A.J. AYER & Al-QAEDA; it would capture its trite quality fairly well. Gray needs to get Schmidt's collection of primary sources, WHAT IS ENLIGHTENMENT? and read the Germans before he again holds forth on what Western philosophy amounts to.
It's not that the complexity of enlightenment is too much for such a small book, but rather that Gray seems totally unfamiliar with it and doesn't know how to present it in a relevant way. There are many, many threads in Enlightenment philosophy, and its scientism is probably the most wide-spread and the most dangerous. Its damage to twentieth century epistemology is incalculable, for instance. If we follow these
threads, we can see relationships with radical ideologies like fascism, Marxism and Leninism, Darwinism and colonialism, etc. But the relationships are complex and it is disingenuous toindict ALL such philosophy on the basis of myriad perversions (of which I agree al-Qaeda is one of the more perverted and complex examples). On these issues I recommend Saul's VOLTAIRE'S BASTARDS for a critique of Western rationality, Jonathan Israel's RADICAL ENLIGHTENMENT focuses on Spinozism and can therefore give some good examples of early enlightenment absolutism (via Spinoza's panentheism), and the classic critique DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT by Horkheimer and Adorno (2002 Stanford translation) for an extended dose of hyperbole on Western rationality as barbaric irrationalism.
I sympathize with Gray's generic anti-utopianism, whether of
neo-liberal economics, marxism, scientism, islamofascism, etc. However, the last act of his book is a vague call for a bankrupt cultural relativism. "Respect for other societies" and all that good stuff. Very nice, yet he seems blind to both the fact that some of these other societies we ought to honor harbor their own virulent utopianism, as well as to the implications of sublimated modernism in his own position. How to address these? Gray is silent. With only one reference to MacIntyre's AFTER VIRTUE, he probably hasn't read it seriously
enough to know that perhaps there he has a starting point to work with in both addressing the failure of the Enlightenment project's ethical and political ambitions, and in being able to evaluate not only our own short comings but those of others in a historicism that will appeal to him.
Books:
- The Genius of Robert Adam: His Interiors
- The Grove Encyclopedia of Classical Art & Architecture (2 Volume Set)
- The Lost Border: The Landscape of the Iron Curtain
- The New Flooring Idea Book: Creating Style from the Ground Up
- The Politics of Taste in Antebellum Charleston
- The Prisons (Le Carceri : the Complete First and Second States)
- The Solar Chimney: Electricity from the Sun
- The Urban Image of Augustan Rome (Contemporary South Asia)
- The Wanderers: Masters of Nineteenth-Century Russian Painting : An Exhibition from the Soviet Union
- The Wonderful Towers of Watts (Reading Rainbow Books)
Books Index
Books Home
Recommended Books
- The Six Wives of Henry VIII
- The Prince Kidnaps a Bride
- The Earth in Transition: Patterns and Processes of Biotic Impoverishment
- The Other Boston Busing Story: What`s Won and Lost Across the Boundary Line
- The Mermaid Chair
- The Strategic Management of Intellectual Capital and Organizational Knowledge
- Thomas Jefferson's Cook Book
- The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters
- The Prairie School: Frank Lloyd Wright and His Midwest Contemporaries
- The Wall Jumper: A Berlin Story
