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Do myths and symbols have anything at all to tell us about reality? Or do they simply deserve to be relegated to the realm of fantastic unreality? The essayists in this volume deploy all the critical tools available in the task of taking myth and symbol seriously. They are not willing to consign the use of the symbolic to the logician or to relinquish the mythical to the comparative anthropologist as something of historical interest only. Instead, they strive for that difficult position that is guided by criticism but is still open to wonder in the face of what myth and symbol offer in terms of enrichment, meaning, and self-transcendence.
In 1933 eminent philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) fled Nazi Germany for the United States. His fame in Europe having already been established through a public debate with Martin Heidegger in 1929, Cassirer would go on to become a noteworthy influence on American culture. His most important early writings focused on the symbol and symbolic interaction, exploring how human cultures—from early myth-based ones to our own modern, scientifically oriented time—have used symbols to mediate the basic forms of experience. Following this work, Cassirer extended his insights to encompass a broad spectrum of philosophical themes: from investigations into Western epistemological and scientific traditions to aesthetics and the philosophy of history to anthropology and political philosophy. Reflecting this diversity in Cassirer’s own work, The Symbolic Construction of Reality collects eleven essays by a wide range of contributors from different fields. Each essay analyzes a different aspect of his legacy, reassessing its significance for our contemporary world and bringing much-needed attention to this seminal thinker.
Mircea Eliade--one of the most renowned expositors of the psychology of religion, mythology, and magic--shows that myth and symbol constitute a mode of thought that not only came before that of discursive and logical reasoning, but is still an essential function of human consciousness. He describes and analyzes some of the most powerful and ubiquitous symbols that have ruled the mythological thinking of East and West in many times and at many levels of cultural development.
This Very Short Introduction explores different approaches to myth from several disciplines, including science, religion, philosophy, literature, and psychology. In this new edition, Robert Segal considers both the future study of myth as well as the impact of areas such as cognitive science and the latest approaches to narrative theory.
Theoretical Anthropology is a major contribution to the historical and critical study of the assumptions underlying the development of modern cultural anthropology. In the new introduction, Martin Bidney discusses the present state of anthropology and contrasts it with the scene surveyed in Theoretical Anthropology. He discusses the relevance of David Bidney's work to our present concerns. Also included in this work is the second edition's introductory essay by David Bidney, written fifteen years after the first edition of Theoretical Anthropology. Here the author examines his original aims in writing this book. Theoretical Anthropology has helped to create among anthropologists the present climate of theoretical self-awareness and broad humanistic concerns. It has become a standard reference work for anthropologists as well as sociologists.
An instant national bestseller! Stanley McChrystal, the retired US Army general and bestselling author of Team of Teams, profiles thirteen of history’s great leaders, including Walt Disney, Coco Chanel, and Robert E. Lee, to show that leadership is not what you think it is—and never was. Stan McChrystal served for thirty-four years in the US Army, rising from a second lieutenant in the 82nd Airborne Division to a four-star general, in command of all American and coalition forces in Afghanistan. During those years he worked with countless leaders and pondered an ancient question: “What makes a leader great?” He came to realize that there is no simple answer. McChrystal profiles thirteen famous leaders from a wide range of eras and fields—from corporate CEOs to politicians and revolutionaries. He uses their stories to explore how leadership works in practice and to challenge the myths that complicate our thinking about this critical topic. With Plutarch’s Lives as his model, McChrystal looks at paired sets of leaders who followed unconventional paths to success. For instance. . . · Walt Disney and Coco Chanel built empires in very different ways. Both had public personas that sharply contrasted with how they lived in private. · Maximilien Robespierre helped shape the French Revolution in the eighteenth century; Abu Musab al-Zarqawi led the jihadist insurgency in Iraq in the twenty-first. We can draw surprising lessons from them about motivation and persuasion. · Both Boss Tweed in nineteenth-century New York and Margaret Thatcher in twentieth-century Britain followed unlikely roads to the top of powerful institutions. · Martin Luther and his future namesake Martin Luther King Jr., both local clergymen, emerged from modest backgrounds to lead world-changing movements. Finally, McChrystal explores how his former hero, General Robert E. Lee, could seemingly do everything right in his military career and yet lead the Confederate Army to a devastating defeat in the service of an immoral cause. Leaders will help you take stock of your own leadership, whether you’re part of a small team or responsible for an entire nation.
“Our main object will be to describe one of the most incomparably beautiful myths that has ever flowered from the mind of man, or from the unconscious processes which shape it and which are in some sense more than man.… This is, furthermore, to be a description and not a history of Christian Mythology.… After description, we shall attempt an interpretation of the myth along the general lines of the philosophia perennis, in order to bring out the truly catholic or universal character of the symbols, and to share the delight of discovering a fountain of wisdom in a realm where so many have long ceased to expect anything but a desert of platitudes.” —from the Prologue
Since prefaces, for the most part, are written after a book is done, yet face the reader before he gets to it, it is perhaps not surprising that we usually find ourselves addressed by a more chastened and qualifying author than we eventually encounter in the ensuing pages. It is, after all, not only some readers, but the writer of a book himself who reads what he has done and failed to do. If the above is the rule, I am no exception to it. The discerning reader need not be told that the following studies differ, not only in the approaches they make to their unifying subject-matter, but also in their precision and thus adequacy of presentation. In addition to the usual reasons for this rather common shortcoming, there is an another one in the case of the present book. In spite of its comparative brevity, the time-span between its inception and termination covers some twenty years. As a result, some (historical and epistemological) sections reflect my preoccupation with CASSI RER'S eady works during student days in Germany and France. When, some ten years later, CASSIRER in a letter expressed "great joy" and anticipation for a more closely supervised con tinuation of my efforts (which, because of his untimely death, never came to pass), he gave me all the encouragement needed to go to work on a critical exposition of his "symbolic form" con cept.