Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: The Faith of a Heretic by Walter Arnold Kaufmann ISBN: 0-452-00482-9 Publisher: New American Library Pub. Date: April, 1978 Format: Paperback List Price(USD): $4.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (6 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Eat this book!
Comment: If some books are meant to be chewed and digested, as Bacon said, then you really need to eat this one. Probably the most important and meaningful book I have ever read, or am ever likely to read. A unique, profound, human point of view on the important questions of life and death.
I've read this one and Kaufmann's Critique of Religion and Philosophy several times and they, more than any other books except James's Varieties of Religious Experience, helped me become a thoughtful and informed atheist (as opposed to a thoughtless one). This book can lay the foundation for your philosophy of life, if you let it. Highest possible recommendation.
Rating: 5
Summary: Way to go, Walter.
Comment: I read this book a few times. I was impressed by the dedication page: "To My Uncles / Walter Seligsohn / who volunteered in 1914 and was shot off his horse on the Russian front in 1915 / . . ." I was definitely not there, but that seemed to be a fantasy that is easier to put into practice than the idea of being a philosopher. In 1980, when I was sure that Walter Kaufmann thought he was a philosopher, but I was more interested in the history of thinking as bombing, I snuck up behind him and dumped a ton of bricks on his head. He shouldn't have been surprised, though, because it was his ton of bricks.
Things were tough, back in the 20th century, and the unsettling thing about this book is how well it avoids the psychological ploy of considering any individual totally insignificant in relation to questions about God. Franz Kafka is the individual who raised the biggest questions about what this book was trying to say, as far as I was concerned, and he seemed to be impossible for Walter Kaufmann to dismiss after the confrontation in section 32, which Kafka begins by observing, "Many complain that the words of the sages are always also mere parables, inapplicable in daily life, which is all we have got." The philosophical analysis of Walter Kaufmann took Kafka's complaint to the usual logical extreme, and found, "discourse that is ostensibly designed to elucidate them scientifically, while in fact its clarity is of the surface only, and on analysis it turns out to approximate double talk, is quite a different matter." (p. 117). In daily life, the question which keeps making an attitude about this kind of thing relevant is how well any individual can accept the acts of any authority as signs of pure benevolence. In 2001, I haven't been too pure, myself, and I still have a copy of THE AMERICAN COLLEGE DICTIONARY (Random House, 1964) which informs me that in English history, a benevolence was once "a forced contribution to the sovereign." Anything funny about this kind of double talk is likely to get me started on crimes against humor, or Nietzsche having the audacity to suggest, in section 273 of BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL, that certain people are condemned to comedy. I would invite people to read this book with the kind of question that keeps cropping up in my mind: Who are these people to tell me that there will be no more beating around the bush?
Rating: 5
Summary: The Best Critical Study of Religion Available
Comment: Writing about religion has always been a risky endeavor. There are few subjects which so often provoke banal,intellectually dishonest discussions that rarely get to the heart of the real issues. But Walter Kaufmann, one of the greatest scholars of the last century, succeeds in Faith of a Heretic where so many others have failed. Instead of defining concepts like "faith" and "religion" without examining their historical and cultural uses, Kaufmann traces religious ideas through their development in the Hebrew Bible, New Testament and subsequent philosophical discourse. This analysis results in a study of religion that avoids the reductionist condemnations of faith so common among today's "free thinkers," and the simplistic diagnoses offered by writers in the "science and religion" movement. If you want to start thinking seriously about religion, this is the place to start.
 |
Title: Critique of Religion and Philosophy by Walter A. Kaufmann ISBN: 0691020019 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 01 April, 1979 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
