Bøker av Bruce Fleming

Academia versus the World Outside explains the givens of the knowledge industry within the ivory tower, colleges and universities. It then moves outside academia to consider this restricted world the way most people see it. The contrast between these two views of academia explains and is at the basis of a major portion of the left-right animosity of our day.The knowledge industry, a creation of the post-Enlightenment modern age along with other industrial and post-industrial enterprises, is based on creating and adding to a store of knowledge as its own end. This makes academia alien to the more random and personal nature of knowledge acquisition in our everyday lives, as indeed every industry is alien to everyday life in the modern age. Yet most academics are so immersed in the peculiar project they have chosen as their life's work that they are unaware of and unsympathetic to the fact that people outside live very different lives with very different presuppositions. Most non-academics, for their part, find academia strange for very good reason. Academia versus the World Outside makes this contrast and conflict clear from both directions. This book is aimed primarily at academics, most of whom so take for granted the givens of what they do that they fail to understand why the vast majority of people outside find academia so strange and alien. This has led to an increasingly hostile and utterly predictable left-right political conflict, academia tending increasingly left and the world outside increasingly right. The goal of this book is to reduce the tension between both sides: if read by non-academics, this book may help them understand the givens of a world as strange to everyday life as any other specialized industry in the modern age.

What is the taste of life as we really live it, rather than the way we imagine it in others? What does it feel like to become aware of the hand of cards we''ve been dealt, to play them as well as we can, to understand what has happened to us, and to try to control the future? Journey to the Middle of the Forest answers these questions in a way that celebrity memoirs, where events seem so much more intense than happenings in our own lives because of our perspective and the writer''s fame, cannot. In Journey to the Middle of the Forest, Bruce Fleming considers the slippages between presupposition and reality in a life begun and continued in Maryland, with intervals in pre-civil war Rwanda, the walled-in city of West Berlin, and the central European Freiburg im Breisgau, once Austrian, then part of the Duchy of Baden, now part of Germany. Like all lives, it has its crisesΓÇömore, it may be, than an average life: a childhood marked by an alcoholic and abusive father, a marriage gone horribly awry, an autistic child and a bipolar stepchild, a dragged-out divorce, the death of a brother to AIDS, and the re-tooling of hopes to meet the new givens of the world. And, then re-marriage, two little boys, and the threat of childhood leukemia. Fleming''s intense and vivid memoir asks us to consider this fundamental question: Do we gain wisdom as we age? We may tell ourselves we do, as a way of summarizing what''s happened to us: we figure everything we''ve been through has to be good for something. But if we do become wiser, it''s not with a wisdom that can help us with any subsequent challenge-and the challenges never cease. Life gets no easier as we age, we just get deeper into the forest.

The Aesthetic Sense of Life is a fast-moving book about how to see the world and get value from living every day with the "everyday." Do the infinite number of sensations we're surrounded with every day have intrinsic value? If not, what gives them value? Who appreciates the sunrise if we don't? Is it enough for just us to appreciate it? Or do we have to share it? The Aesthetic Sense of Life considers and answers to questions such as these in clear, readable prose, offering a way of looking at life that makes clear its value and its meaning.The aesthetic sense of life is neither the viewpoint of the saints¿for whom the sensations of the world are mere murmuring and illusion¿nor the viewpoint of those completely fulfilled by their things, their gadgets, the particulars of their own lives. Most of us fall in the middle between these two extremes: we appreciate, say, a good cup of coffee, a power tool, a new set of towels, or a juicy steak, but don't think the answer to the riddle of existence is to be found in any of these. We appreciate them without thinking them sufficient. What's missing from them? What's missing is this: a sense that they can give meaning to life.

Homage to Eugene O'Neill re-invokes O'Neill's own muses to offer a re-conception of his artistic world, a re-enactment, and an entirely new work not so much in the style but in the spirit of the Nobel-prize winning American dramatist.

What if Plato's Symposium took place in present-day America rather than in ancient Athens? The Thanksgiving Symposium imagines this, and makes it happen. Like Plato's dialogue, The Thanksgiving Symposium focuses on the age-old question: what is the nature of love? In The Thanksgiving Symposium, three men and three women of varying ages and degrees of closeness meet for Thanksgiving dinner. Their particular situations give rise to a discussion of love in the general and the specific, leavened with the normal give and take of social interaction. During the evening, much is discussed and some things are decided. Plato's dialogue verges on being a play about philosophy rather than a philosophy, people discussing things rather than a philosopher telling us what to conclude. The Thanksgiving Symposium develops this aspect of Plato while offering a new philosophy that responds to the old. Is the result a play? A dialogue? A philosophy? Like Plato's Symposium, it is all of these at once.

Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was informed by the belief that it was possible to get clarity once and for all on fundamental philosophical issues, and so to think our way to a silence where philosophy was no longer necessary. This is The New Tractatus: it sympathizes with Wittgenstein's impatience with the endless cycle of argument, but reacts to this impatience and takes it in different directions than Wittgenstein did.Wittgenstein was concerned with questions like these: What is the meaning of language? What is our relationship to the universe? What is the nature of philosophy? These questions are covered in The New Tractatus, along with many other topics, such as: Why is sex a controversial issue? Why are we so interested in celebrities? What is the nature of love? Why do liberals and conservatives argue about so many things? What is magic? Can miracles occur? Is science objective? Does art lie to us? How do we win arguments? What is the meaning of life?What The New Tractatus shares with the old is the fundamental perception that we can never transcend what is. The world is all that is the case: whatever comes to be is part of the world.

This book is set in many places-Cairo, the Eastern Sierras, Las Vegas, New York's Adirondack Mountains, and Barcelona, among others-but always in the moving body of the runner hurtling both through and into the world. It is a hymn to human motion and an explanation of its sweetness.

Offers an explanation for the polarization between liberal and conservative that is the hallmark of the American political landscape. This book presents a set of guidelines to predict a person's views based on other views they hold, given that each world-view is what it is for structural reasons, and is more than a sum of discrete positions.

Many otherwise competent adults are wobbly writers, whether they're college students or already thriving in a job. They probably exhibit a 'go get 'em' attitude for most of their lives, but find themselves stumped by a blank computer screen or a piece of paper. What, they wonder, do I do now? What's my next word, next sentence? But their problems aren't solved by somebody telling them what to do, only by someone helping them figure things out themselves. As the adage says: give a person a fish and s/he eats that day; teach a person to fish and s/he eats for life. They need a little help from Bill the Goat.