Excursions with Thoreau Philosophy, Poetry, Religion

by Mooney, Edward F.

• ISBN13: 9781501305658
• ISBN10: 1501305654
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2015-10-22
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

Excursions with Thoreau is a major new exploration of Thoreau's writing and thought that is philosophical yet sensitive to the literary and religious.

Edward F. Mooney's excursions through passages from Walden, Cape Cod, and his late essay “Walking” reveal Thoreau as a miraculous writer, artist, and religious adept. Of course Thoreau remains the familiar political activist and environmental philosopher, but in these fifteen excursions we discover new terrain. Among the notable themes that emerge are Thoreau's grappling with underlying affliction; his pursuit of wonder as ameliorating affliction; his use of the enigmatic image of “a child of the mist”; his exalting “sympathy with intelligence” over plain knowledge; and his preferring “befitting reverie”-not argument-as the way to be carried to better, cleaner perceptions of reality.

Mooney's aim is bring alive Thoreau's moments of reverie and insight, and to frame his philosophy as poetic and episodic rather than discursive and systematic.

Author Biography

Edward F. Mooney is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Syracuse University, USA. He is the author or editor of nine books, including Kierkegaard's Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs
(Editor and Introduction, 2009), Lost Intimacy in American Thought (Continuum, 2009), and Excursions with Kierkegaard (Bloomsbury, 2012).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Mourning Turtle Doves: An amble from Concord
2. Walking, Sympathy, Intelligence
3. Reflections from Concord
4. Perception and Transformation in Walden
5. Wonder and Affliction: A Dionysian World
6. From Affliction to Wonder
7. Interlude: An Unfeathered Bird
8. Mystic, Transcendentalist, Child of the Mist
9. Translations: John Brown, Apples, Lilies
10. Wild Ethics
11. “Concord River”: on Currents of Time
12. Postscript to Concord River
13. The Face of a River: Levinas and Thoreau
Notes
Bibliography