As Wide as the World Is Wise

Michael D. Jackson

Michael D. Jackson

As Wide as the World Is Wise

Reinventing Philosophical Anthropology

Columbia University Press | 2016

https://doi.org/10.7312/jack17828

Overview
Contents

About this book

Understanding the human condition through ethnography and critical philosophy.

Author information

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).

Reviews

Recommended.

Jarrett Zigon, author of Morality: An Anthropological Perspective:
At a time when anthropologists are increasingly drawing on and engaging with philosophy and philosophers, Jackson has given us the best account thus far of how this might be possible. Eschewing the common anthropological criticism that philosophy is too universalizing and abstract, Jackson shows us how in our time much philosophical practice is an attempt to think through the immediate and pressing issues of everyday existence. Anthropology, Jackson argues, is perfectly positioned to contribute significantly to such thinking. The result is an important and innovative articulation of a potential philosophical anthropology.

Thomas Schwarz Wentzer, Aarhus University:
Jackson's marvelous book delivers ethnographic evidence for philosophical issues originating from the necessities of ordinary life, reminding us that philosophy actually never was (just) a matter of academic discourse and abstract thinking but has always been rooted in various media—myths, tales, rites, sayings—that express the diversities of life-forms, their norms and values, and their existential truths and wisdom.

Veena Das, coeditor of The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy:
As Wide as the World Is Wise is a book that gives any soul tortured by questions arising from the way the world is today a feeling that one has found an author who has heard the torment of such a soul and has offered instructions on how to live with these questions, not because they have been solved but because these questions have been heard without recourse to sentimentalism or quick-fix solutions.

Frontmatter Free access PDF PDF	i
Contents Free access PDF PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	ix
Introduction Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	1
1. Analogy and Polarity Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	27
2. Identity and Difference Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	51
3. Relations and Relata Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	63
4. Matters of Life and Death Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	82
5. Ourselves and Others Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	100
6. Belief and Experience Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	120
7. Persons and Types Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	137
8. Being and Thought Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	153
9. Fate and Freewill Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	167
10. Center and Periphery Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	181
11. Ecologies of Mind Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	203
Notes Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	215
Index Access restricted Content is available PDF PDF	245

As Wide as the World Is Wise

Reinventing Philosophical Anthropology

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