Indiana Books

Professor Jackson has embarked on a consciously obscure symbolism. Before reading this book, fractals conjured in my mind those trippy psychedelic posters. Then there is a reason fractals are a trippy subject, and the implications are beyond pop culture and pure geometry. Fractals are an epitome of chaos-complexity theory; they are representative of the universes nature. This book demonstrates that humans have innately picked up on the deep sense of order within the universe `chaos-complexity theory'. The universe is highly structured, even when seemingly chaotic there is a very fine intricacy of structure and in the fractal that is repetitive, infinite.

I do have to say that this book can be a bit tricky to read (or rather approach); one must approach it as being less a description, and more of a philosophical and religious dissertation. I mean this to say; that the nature of the Fractal is in this book used - to launch a greater discussion, of the infinite and complexity they represent. Rather this book is about the greater mystery of the universe and an examination of the sacred geometry of fractals. William Jackson takes us across cultures to explore the mysteries of the infinite, the divine consciousness, and how the fractal has played a universal cross cultural symbolism to the mysteries. Otherwise know that fractals are a sort of symbolism and this book is very representative of that nature.

I can say, that it makes one think twice about those tripy pop culture posters, as there exist the possibility that they devour you into revelation.


K.D. Goodman

These are the chapters of this work: Hebrew and Modernity, Secularity and the Tradition of Hebrew verse, Inventing Hebrew prose, Fogel and the Forging of a Hebrew self, The Inner Immigration of Hebrew Prose, The Israeli Novel and Post World-War II fiction , Vistas of Annihilation, A portrait of Yehuda Amichai, Agnon's Psychological Realim, Agnon's Shira, Kafka's Father Agnon's Mother, Bellow's Cousins.
This is a group of illuminating essays by one of the most accomplished of Hebrew language literary critics. This is a sample of Alter's polished and insightful analysis " Agnon's Hebrew is an intricate echo chamber, constantly and deviously recapitulating the literary and theological history of the language as he deploys it. Symbolic reconfiguration of familial and other materials in his fiction is also a repeated interrogation of the values of the present through those of the past, and vice versa. Ecclesiastes and the Book of Judges , medieval Hebrew poetry and the Zohar, resonate weirdly through Israel in the age of archeological discovery, which is the setting of Edo and Enam. Of course, such a process of highly charged intertextuality is by no means unique to Hebrew, but it finds an unusually congenial medium in the long tradition of Hebrew. an urgent, often surprising dialogue between different eras , extending to the microscopic articulations of the text, was a distinctive feature of Hebrew literary expression, at least through the middle decades of this century, and even as we approach the century's end, there is at least some evidence in current Hebrew writing from the poetry of Yehuda Amichai to th avant- garde novels of Yoel Hoffman that the millenia- long dialogue is far from done. p. 188

I have been a huge admirer of Meir Sternberg's work since I first read his "The Poetics of Biblical Narrative" in the early 90s. Sternberg is a professor of literature who has spent an enormous amount of effort trying to clarify people's assumptions about the seemingly commonplace yet astoundingly complex process of reading. In "Poetics," he broke new ground in teaching biblical scholars how to read the Bible as literature not on the basis of 19th or 20th century principles of literary criticism, but on the basis of the Bible's own internal poetics.

With "Hebrews," Sternberg took on a related task: exploring the presuppositions or half-considered assumptions of scholars and other writers who seek to place the biblical Israelites within the cultural contexts of their times. He engages this task through the lens of the single term, "Hebrew." Rarely have I been as thoroughly challenged to think clearly and carefully as when reading this mammoth book!

Sternberg's prose is not for everyone. It is thick, complex and can, for some, seem maddeningly idiosyncratic. Yet for those willing to discover how his prose is designed as a precision tool and not as mere embellishment, Sternberg can be experienced as a fascinating writer unlike any other.

Don't expect to pick up this book and breeze through it. Rather, savor it, consider it, let its questions, analyses and provocative suggestions challenge and transform you.

Here is another book of philosophy lectures with no index. The Contents has a lot of section number and titles, but the possibility of some confusion is already obvious in the title for section 3, "The significance of the first part of the system with regard to the designation of both its titles." (p. v, pp. 17-26). This still relates to the early part of the Introduction before "Preliminary Consideration" (p. v, pp. 32-42), which consists of section 5, "The presupposition of the Phenomenology: Its absolute beginning with the absolute." If this seems excessive in the substitution of words for whatever this series of lectures is supposed to be about, there is a little chart of the basic Phenomenology-system at the bottom of page 7 which shows how Part I of Hegel's philosophy, his book, PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT, is merely an introduction to the Encyclopedia-system, which Hegel originally called Part II, before it was written, but which was divided in three parts, Logic, Philosophy of Nature, and Philosophy of Spirit, in the Encyclopedia which included Phenomenology of Spirit as merely "The second section of the first part (subjective spirit)" (p. 7) of the three main divisions included "in the transformed system of philosophy." (p. 7). Heidegger admits that this is a very philosophical move:

"But should one not say then that Hegel already at the beginning of his work presupposes and anticipates what he wants to achieve only at the end? Certainly this must be said. Indeed, whoever wishes to understand anything of his work must say that again and again. The attempt to diminish this `fact'--as we would like to call it--show, furthermore, how little this work has been understood. . . . For it pertains to the essential character of philosophy that wherever philosophy sets to work in terms of its basic question and becomes a work, it already anticipates precisely that which it says later." (p. 30).

These lectures on Hegel's first major work "constitutes the lecture course given by Heidegger at the University of Freiburg during the winter semester of 1930/31. The German edition, edited by Ingtraud Goerland, was published in 1980 by Vittorio Klostermann Verlag." (p. viii). Normally publication dates matter little in philosophy, and the English translation did not appear until 1988, but the publication in German in 1980 might be considered an answer to specific questions raised by hotshot American philosopher and Princeton professor Walter Kaufmann, near the end of his life, who published a three-volume set in 1980 called Discovering the Mind, after some of the ideas were presented in 1974 and the first draft was completed in 1976, in which Hegel was considered too rushed to be considered philosophical: "especially in his first book he came to write at such a pace that he put fleeting thoughts and doubtful notions down on paper and then had to send them to the printer without any opportunity to rethink what he had written." (DM, V. I, pp. 255-256). Volume II made the same points regarding the publication of Heidegger's first original work, only half a system in which "Heidegger secularized Christian preaching about guilt, dread, and death, but claimed to break with two thousand years of Western thought." (DM, VII, p. xvi). Privately, in "an unpublished letter that Heidegger had written to Karl Loewith on August 19, 1921" (DM, VII, p. 170), Heidegger had written "but it must be added that I am no philosopher, and I do not imagine that I am doing anything remotely comparable; that is not my intention. . . . I am a `Christian theologian.' " (DM, VII, p. 171).

It should be obvious that Heidegger was capable of recognizing systems and identifying them quite easily. In HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT, he has titles in his Contents that call out: "the System of Science," "1. The system of the phenomenology and of the encyclopedia," "2. Hegel's conception of a system of science," "b) Absolute and relative knowledge. Philosophy as the system of science," "4. The inner mission of the phenomenology of spirit as the first part of the system." Such an understanding of systems is entirely philosophical, and Heidegger's defense of his BEING AND TIME in the final few pages of these lectures is entirely philosophical in nature. He was not supposed to be writing about himself, but about the philosophical "problematic of `being and time' " (pp. 146-147) which previously flared up "for the first and only time, namely, in Kant--people refuse to see the problem and speak rather of my arbitrarily reading my own views into Kant. There is something peculiar about the lack of understanding in our contemporaries by virtue of which one can become famous all of a sudden, and indeed in a dubious sense." (p. 147). That he could complain about being famous as a philosopher already in 1931, before any notoriety from political scandals could make the picture as messy as a German mentality would be a few years later, tends to show that Heidegger had a better grasp of philosophical matters than any of his competitors, of whom only Karl Jaspers, the famous doctor-philosopher whose books include one on GENERAL PSYCHOPATHOLOGY, springs to mind as truly great.

Heidegger pictures Hegel's first book as a process of creeping up on absolute knowledge. "Hence, the work ends with the short section DD, which is entitled `Absolute Knowledge.' " (pp. 32-33). This leads up to the main assignment:

"In this lecture course I presuppose such a first reading of the entire work. If such a reading has not taken place or does not take place in the next few weeks, there is no sense in sitting here: You cheat not only me but yourselves. However, the first reading is not a guarantee that with the second reading we really understand the work. Perhaps the first reading must be frequently repeated, which is only to say that the first reading is utterly indispensable." (p. 36).

This work contains essays by some of the usual suspects in Heideggerian scholarship as well as by some of the newer generation of scholars. All of the essays appear recent (as evidenced by some criticisms of war) and not recycled and are first rate dealing with some aspect of Heidegger and/or the Greeks. Hyland's essay is too short and very light on Heidegger, while Warnek's overly long and slow-going essay has little to do with the Greeks and more about Heidegger and Hoelderlin. Baracchi is quickly becoming one of my favorite scholars out there, she writes brilliantly and with great insight. It's good to see Richardson awakening from his psychoanalytic slumber although his essay is on Heidegger and--what else--Lacan, where the word "and" is the key--or not. Let's hope that he will stop wasting his time and re-dedicate to philosophy. Gonzalez's essay is perhaps the most surprising--a joyeously aggressive critique of Heidegger's interpretation of Aristotle done in a fairly straightforward way: this is what Aristotle says, this is what Heidegger makes of it. His reading of Aristotle may be a little too plain, but frankly and unfortunately that's how most readings of Aristotle are. Brogan, Figal, Schmidt, and Sallis are typically reliable and solid. Fried's is easy going as he writes in a somewhat untechnical way. This book is highly recommended not only for serious Heidegger scholars but also for advanced beginning students who would like to know more about Heidegger by way of the Greeks.

When I sent copies of this book to members of my family and some friends, their reactions were all the same: "It sure is big!" That's true. Henry Halleck's War is more than 700 pages long; it uses roughly 250,000 words; its 20 chapters contain close to 1,800 source citations -- what we used to call footnotes; and it weighs three pounds, six and a half ounces. Why is it so big? A great many pages are devoted to messages, letters, and reports General Halleck wrote during the war. They show that his contributions to the Union's successful war effort were both numerous and valuable -- and that critics such as Gideon Welles were wrong. It was Welles who said, "Halleck originates nothing, anticipates nothing, takes no responsibility, plans nothing, suggests nothing, is good for nothing." Hardly anyone ever said anything good about Halleck during his lifetime. His friend Cump Sherman urged him to defend himself, to fight back. General Halleck refused. He was willing to be judged by what was in the records. In them, he told Cump, some future historian would find the truth about him and what he did. But during the past hundred years, too few scholars have bothered to go through the 128 thick volumes of the Official Records, flip through crumbling pages until they found the documents that involved General Halleck, and study them. As a result, just about everyone has agreed with Welles that Henry Halleck was a disaster. However, recently Guild Press of Indiana put the entire wall of books called the Official Records on a single wafer-thin CD-ROM. That made it possible for me to do what General Halleck trusted someone would do -- study his record. But I've gone beyond that. The messages, letters, and reports included in this book enable readers to judge Halleck for themselves -- which, I think, is what he hoped would happen. In the course of selecting all these materials and providing enough narrative to place them in historical context, several things surprised me. First, the requirements of the job of general-in-chief were very different from what Halleck's critics assumed. No one knew what a general-in-chief was supposed to do. No valid precedent or standards for judging his performance existed. Even so, ignorance didn't stop anyone from declaring General-in-Chief Halleck a failure. Second, his relationship to Abraham Lincoln had a special aspect that has been completely overlooked. Both men were lawyers: Lincoln in central Illinois, Old Brains out in San Francisco -- indeed, he was the respected senior partner of California's leading law firm. Accordingly, Halleck's performance ought to be judged as that of a special counsel retained to help Lincoln prosecute Union versus Confederacy -- a case that was being tried on battlefields from eastern Virginia to New Mexico. In everything General Halleck wrote you will find precision of thought and expression reflecting his expertise both in military art and in the ability to reduce complex questions to basic principles -- and then to apply them. These were skills that Lincoln needed desperately. Some observers have hailed him as a military genius -- but if you read closely some of the documents he signed, you will see how dependent he actually was on special counsel Halleck. Third, this book also contains messages and letters to Halleck from Don Carlos Buell, George McClellan, William Rosecrans, Cump Sherman, Ulysses Grant, and many other generals. I was surprised by how much they revealed about themselves in what they wrote Halleck. I had never known enough about General Buell, for example, to have an opinion about him. But from the messages he sent Old Brains, I learned why he was such a disappointment. Same regarding McClellan -- the "Young Napoleon." If you doubt that he was a spoiled brat, just read his messages to his wife and to General Halleck. My fourth surprise was that I could compress the quarter of a million words in this book into a single simple sentence: General Halleck didn't win the war, but clearly he kept Abraham Lincoln from losing it. Lincoln was completely unprepared to be Commander- in-Chief, and initially he made some dreadful mistakes. That stopped in mid-1862 when he sent a peremptory order to Halleck to come to Washington. Halleck saved the Union capital by moving McClellan's Army of the Potomac northward to help John Pope. He saved Grant when Lincoln secretly gave command of the Vicksburg operation to a political general already notorious for incompetence. But Halleck couldn't always save Lincoln from blundering. Behind Halleck's back, Lincoln gave command of the Army of the Potomac to "Fighting Joe" Hooker -- with General Lee's brilliant victory at Chancellorsville as a humiliating result. Ordinarily, however, Old Brains and the President reached a meeting of the minds. Both men, being lawyers, placed great weight on principles. Halleck was driven by a high sense of duty and of honor and of love of country. But he was also an expert on the principles of military art, and he enforced them. He told Lincoln and later Grant, You cannot, you dare not try to control a battle from a desk hundreds or thousands of miles from the killing site. "I hold," Old Brains declared, "that a general in command of an army in the field is the best judge of existing conditions."

That was the Halleck Doctrine. It was turned on its head recently during military operations in the Balkans directed from the White House. Reputations, Professor Walter McDougall has written, are the only things over which historians have control. Historians destroyed Henry Halleck's reputation. It's time to give some of his good name back to him.

This is an excellent collection of hermeneutical essays that attack the most difficult issues of interpretation from many unique and diverse perspectives. Easily a five star rating.

There are essays to reflect a variety of approaches and appreciations. For example, those who sympathize with preserving the intentions of the author will appreciate the perspectives of Vanhoozer and Wolterstorff. On the other hand, the essay of James K.A. Smith discusses the relevancy of some of Derrida's perspectives for biblical interpretation. Benson's essay draws parallels between the improvisation of jazz and the process of interpretation and Faber even takes a peak at the theater! Yet what holds together these diverse essays are still some of the most fundamental issues confronting interpreters including the issues of authorial intent, the role of the reader, and the ontology of the text.

While I think many of these essays would be interesting to the non-churchman the essays are situated in the particular context of faith. To that I say, "It's about time!" It is encouraging to see these thoughtful and diverse essays exploring key hermeneutical issues in a constructive dialogue. Here's hoping that more of this will follow in the future.

One more essay of note that I would be remiss if I failed to mention is Echeverria's essay on Gadamer and relativism. Ah, so many good essays in this collection!

I have engaged a few of the key essays in this collection at my blog, The Theos Project. (You can just do a simple Google search for "Theos Project.") The essays have sparked some stimulating discussion, with James K.A. Smith even dropping by for a few comments. And my blog is not the only place where I am seeing these essays pop up around the internet. So, add this book to your shopping cart and get to reading so you can join in the ongoing discussion. I believe that a few of these essays will be important for helping to set the tone of the future discussion of hermeneutics and the interpretation of Scripture, so keep on top of the conversation!

A parenthetical note: These essays presuppose some prior knowledge of hermeneutics and/or appreciation for the finer points of literature interpretation.

Jonathan Erdman
Winona Lake, Indiana

When I experienced my last glorious academic sabbatical, I had two separate goals. One, to carry out some standard political science research to generate some publications. Two, to make an effort to acquaint myself with postmodernism and its political implications. This book was an important part of that process. It served as one of my takeoff points in the second effort. I assigned myself several "accessible" works on postmodernism to give me some vocabulary, so that I was in some kind of shape to begin reading Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Chantal Mouffe, and so on. For me, daunting works to explore. But books like Madison's volume did help give me the base for reading the primary sources.

Madison begins by noting what postmodernism is reacting to--the modern view of humankind. Here, the assumption is that humans are "knowing subjects," who, through reason, can assess what external objective reality is. The roots of this, the Enlightenment, go back to Plato's "Allegory of the Cave," where those with wisdom can come to see the light outside the cave and know truth.

However, as Madison notes, there are traditions in philosophy that question such conceptions of rationality and modernism. One such perspective is hermeneutics, the theory of interpretation. Madison discusses some key figures here, such as Husserl and Gadamer. Gadamer's work, "Truth and Method" (which I reviewed a while back), argues that we cannot possibly recover original meanings of works; we can only interpret their meaning as best we can. In an illuminating chapter (Chapter 7), Madison juxtaposes several key thinkers, Gadamer, Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida, to explore what separates them and what might unite them, in terms of the modern project of truth and reality seeking. Chapters such as this were immensely helpful in terms of my sabbatical as I tried to understand the debates among critics of modernism and what was at stake in those debates.

The book closes with a quotation from Stanley Fish (Page 191): ". . .like it or not, interpretation is the only game in town." This emphasizes a rejection of the rationality of modernism, which itself claims that through our reason we can apprehend and understand objective reality "out there." Not so, says Fish, and other contemporary hermeneutists in the Gadamerian tradition as well as postmodern thinkers.

Anyhow, this book helped me to make sense of the debate before I plunged into reading some almost unreadable thinkers (Foucault once described Derrida as an "obscurante terroriste"--a person who wrote in a difficult manner [obscurante] and then savaged those whom he felt misinterpreted him [terroriste]). This book itself is not easy reading, but it is a nice introduction into a rich and almost intimidating literature.

Another Beautiful and informative book by the World's Authority on this Style and its manufacturers. Learned much and enjoyed the rare items even more!!

If you liked "A Dictionary of Modern English Usage," you will love "The King's English."

For three generations, a single book dominated the market as the authoritative reference in matters of grammar, style, and usage in the English language: "A Dictionary of Modern English Usage" by H.W. Fowler, first published in 1926, now in its third edition (published 1996). Twenty years earlier, however, Fowler and his younger brother F.G. (their given names were Henry Watson and Francis George) had collaborated on a precursor, "The King's English," first published in 1906 (and which went into its third edition a quarter century later, a few years after the first edition of "A Dictionary" appeared).

This book is every bit as charming and graceful as the later "Dictionary" and, while this earlier work covers fewer topics than "Dictionary," it treats the ones that it does cover with as much thoroughness and skill as "Dictionary"--in some cases with more thoroughness, since the book is structured as part essay, part textbook, and can thus afford more examples and exercises than "Dictionary." The book begins by laying out five "general principles" worthy of Strunk and White (whose masterpiece "The Elements of Style" did not appear until half a century later): "Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched. Prefer the concrete word to the abstract. Prefer the single word to the circumlocution. Prefer the short word to the long. Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance."

The Fowlers expand upon those five "principles," and also treat vocabulary, syntax, punctuation, and other such technical matters in great depth. But amidst these technical chapters they also include a lengthy chapter on "airs and graces," in which they advise the reader about imbuing writing with art.

The Fowlers write with every bit as much elegance, flair, and humor as they advise their readers to use, and their mastery of their subject is unsurpassed. "The King's English" has stood the test of time and, today, a century after its initial publication, it still stands the Fowler brothers with Strunk and White from half a century ago and Bryan Garner of today in the first rank of authors about style and usage in the English language.