scholarly journals A good life: Friendship, Art and Truth

Conatus ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 115
Author(s):  
Alexander Nehamas
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Moral Agent ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
Practical Philosophy ◽  
Individual Values ◽  
The Real ◽  
Real Issue ◽  
Starting Point

In September 2017 Alexander Nehamas kindly accepted our invitation to have a meeting in Athens in order to discuss several issues of philosophical interest; with his latest publication On Friendship (New York: Basic Books, 2016) as a starting point we soon moved over to a multitude of topics Nehamas has so far dealt with. The whole conversation spirals around the probably most challenging and demanding issue as far as practical philosophy is concerned – yet one every moral agent needs to provide an adequate answer to during his lifetime: Values. Do they exclusively belong to the domain of morality? Nehamas claims that “although moral values […] are important […], they are not the only values that determine whether a life is or is not worthwhile”. This view inevitably shifts the focus from individual values - even fundamental ones such as friendship, art and truth- to the real issue: What is a good life, after all?

The real issue

1983 ◽  
Vol 28 (5) ◽  
pp. 413-413
Author(s):  
Seymour Fisher
Keyword(s):  
The Real ◽  
Real Issue

The Modernities of H. Lawrence Freeman

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
White Press ◽  
Grand Opera

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.

The real issue

1951 ◽  
Vol 42 (165-168) ◽  
pp. 219-223
Keyword(s):  
The Real ◽  
Real Issue

scholarly journals The Events of June 1848: the ‘Monte Cristo’ Riots and the Politics of Protest

2003 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Emeljanow
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Full Length ◽  
Anton Chekhov ◽  
University Of Iowa ◽  
The Real ◽  
Social Concerns ◽  
Critical Heritage ◽  
Cultural Tensions ◽  
The University

Theatrical riots are usually dismissed as occasions during which aesthetic reactionaries battled reformers over stylistic issues of little relevance to pressing and immediate social concerns. Yet how true is this? What were the real issues which boiled over at such apparently confined and innocuous occasions as the Old Price Riots at Covent Garden in 1809, the Paris Ernani riot of 1830, the visit of a celebrated English actor which sparked the New York Astor Place riot in 1849, or the first night of a play which brought about the Playboy riots in Dublin in 1907? The complex social and cultural tensions on such occasions clearly operated during the two days of disturbance which came to be known as the Monte Cristo riots in London in 1848, and there are curious modern parallels. Victor Emeljanow is Professor of Drama at the University of Newcastle, Australia. His full length works include Anton Chekhov: the Critical Heritage, Victorian Popular Dramatists, and, with Jim Davis, Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing, 1840–1880 (University of Iowa Press, 2001), which was recently awarded the Society for Theatre Research's Book Prize for 2002.

Bodies of Meaning: Studies on Language, Labor, and Liberation. By David McNally. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. 277p. $72.50 cloth, $23.95 paper.

2002 ◽  
Vol 96 (1) ◽  
pp. 189-191
Author(s):  
Nicholas Xenos
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
State University ◽  
The Real

David McNally styles this book as beginning in a polemic and ending in a “materialist approach to language” much indebted to the German critic Walter Benjamin. The charge is that “postmodernist theory, whether it calls itself poststructuralism, deconstruction or post-Marxism, is constituted by a radical attempt to banish the real human body—the sensate, biocultural, laboring body—from the sphere of language and social life” (p. 1). By treating language as an abstraction, McNally argues, postmodernism constitutes a form of idealism. More than that, it succumbs to and perpetuates the fetishism of commodities disclosed by Marx insofar as it treats the products of human laboring bodies as entities independently of them. Clearly irritated by the claims to radicalism made by those he labels postmodern, McNally thinks he has found their Achilles' heel: “The extra-discursive body, the body that exceeds language and discourse, is the ‘other’ of the new idealism, the entity it seeks to efface in order to bestow absolute sovereignty on language. To acknowledge the centrality of the sensate body to language and society is thus to threaten the whole edifice of postmodernist theory” (p. 2).

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