Michigan Books

Isaac Casaubon was a Genevan scholar who happened upon the Church of England and there discovered what he deemed a most fine appropriation of the ancient church of the first four centuries. Casaubon was befriended by Lancelot Andrewes and together they worked on a fitting reply to the Roman Catholic attack upon the validity of the Church of England's religion. This is the result. Some of the arguments concerning the Anglican Church's relation to anitiquity have become staples of Anglicanism; other arguments in this work might tell the reader more about the mind of early Anglicans at the turn of the seventeenth century.

Again, the pictures in the book are easy enough to use for my 3 year old. The information contained in the book is useful. We enjoy using this book and look forward to the spring and summer when we can travel further than our backyard.

This is a much needed reference for ever student of the Anishinaabemowin. Granted Johnston does not use the Fiero Double-vowel orthography, his phonetic spelling is systematic and clear, thus easily understood by all. In addition, often students learn their vocabulary for the vocabulary's sake without really learning the construct of the word, but Johnston forces the basic word construct to the forefront by aggregating words into a "thesaurus" and pointing out in the theme-based construct of words of Anishinaabemowin. He groups words in their similarity and then divides these groupings into five sections: nouns, modifiers (adjectives, adverbs, conjuctions, prepositions and pronouns), suffixes, verbs and prefixes. While Nichols and Nyholm in "Concise Dictionary of Minnesota Ojibwe" provides for many excellent preverbs, Johnston provides a glossary of postverbs to which the preverbs attach to form new verb concepts.

Johnston's goal here is to present the building blocks of the vocabulary so that each student of the Anishinaabe language has the power and knowledge to build thier own vocabulary... and Johnston has met his goal with excellence.

This book from 1920 consists of the Tarner Lectures in the philosophy of science and features Whitehead's assessment of the impact of Einstein's theories on nature. He argues for taking events and the process of becoming as the starting points for analysing reality. This organic interpretation is not simple, but it does make more sense than the abstract concept of matter as assumed by scientists and philosophers for so long.

Whitehead criticizes the idea of nature as a mere aggregate of independent entities, each capable of isolation. According to this idea, by their accidental relations entities form the system of nature. In this theory space might exist without time, and time without space. The relational theory of space is an admission that space without matter or matter without space cannot exist.

But the seclusion of both from time is still accepted. Whitehead's alternative is that nothing in nature could be what it is except as an ingredient in nature as it exists. There cannot be time apart from space, because every event forms part of a whole and is significant in the whole. Likewise there can be no space apart from time.

Our knowledge of nature is an experience of activity or passage. Events are active entities; their relations with one another differentiate into space-relations and time-relations. But this differentiation is comparatively superficial, since time and space are each partial expressions of one fundamental relation between events, which is neither spatial not temporal. Whitehead calls this relation Extension: it is the relation of including and does not require spatio-temporal differentiation.

I found the book extremely challenging to read and had to go back constantly to re-read and properly assimilate previous passages in order to proceed. And Whitehead uses mathematical formulae that I am not familiar with. But people with a solid grounding in the natural sciences will have no such problem. A determination to understand at least some of this great man's ideas was certainly rewarded in reading and studying this book.

The chapters are titled: Nature and Thought; Theories of the Bifurcation of Nature; Time; The Method of Extensive Abstraction; Congruence; Objects; Summary, and The Ultimate Physical Concepts. The book concludes with an index.

I have first read this book several years ago; I have now came back to it and my first impressions have just been reasserted: it is a "must" reading for anyone interested in Durkheim's work. The reason is simple. This is one of Durkheim's early works, published in the same year as the monumental "Division of Labour in Society". However, contrary to the latter monograph, Durkheim here addresses the precursors of nineteenth-century sociology, trying to identify the antecedents of modern social sciences. In a word, if you want to fully understand Durkheim's influences and aims the careful reading of this early book is unavoidable.

On the Continent, the 9th century was a period of extended struggle among the children and grandchildren of Charles the Great, constant coastal raiding by northern pirates, and tedious quarrels among theologians. This now-classic collection of biographical essays chronicles the rise and decline of Charles's empire through the careers of such men as Einhard of Seligenstadt. But our interest here is in the scholarly but very readable piece on Louis the Pious, the solitary and monastic son and successor of Charles, whose inability to cope with his legacy resulted in profound changes in political and religious relationships, especially between the king/emperor and the diverse military aristocracy.

The writer of Medievel mysteries Umberto Eco, after seeking his counsel, called Etienne Gilson an "Illustrious medievalist... dear and unforgettable" (quoted from the intro of the book "The Name of the Rose"). Well, Etienne Gilson, in this book, "Heloise and Abelard" sets out to solve a real mystery set in medieval times; that of the intricacies of love, an unplanned pregenancy, and the resultant problems (Abelard ,was castrated (but two of his assailants were, under Christian justice at the time, given the same treatment, as well as having their eyes gouged out)). Gilson in the manner of detective and psychologist, as well as historian, attempts to deal out justice as well as look inside people's hearts, and discover their true intents (which he admits in the end, God only knows). The true story of Heloise's love for Abelard is one of the most endearing ever told and something that many medievalists tinker around with (including Heiko Oberman) Abelard was on superstar status, in his day, as a professor of theology and philosophy in age where students had much more leeway to choose their teachers and professors were paid by the number of students they had; Abelard was so popular he had to hold classes outside. Part history, part philosophy (or history of philosophy), and Gilson takes some liberties at psychologizing a bit. If you like Umberto Eco you might like this book as well, but read about them on the internet or in an encyclopedia before you start, if you know nothing about them, as Gilson gets right into the detectiving with little background details. There are all kinds of devious and/or devoted monks that Abelard must contend with, like the monks in Umberto Eco's stories.

Favorite quotes, from the book:

"Their appeal (Heloise and Abelard's) is to a system of ethics which separates the order of acts from the order of intensions(65)."

"They both played the comedy of sanctity(53)."

"What is a husband but a domesticated beast of burden"(31, Gilson quoting Theophratus).

Some interesting words on marriage, death, love, loyalty, wisdom, sorrow, and providence are also expounded on. Gilson (despite Heiko Oberman in his book "Dawn of the Reformation" placed Gilson, with the name of Arnold Toynbee, as an arbitrary period in history making sophist) clearly states, in the last chapter, that separating the medieval times with the Renaissance -- especially given what huge a word renaissance entails and the disparaging implications for the time previous -- points out the silliness of such a word as Abelard and, especially, Heloise have many "Renaissance" charatoristics despite belonging to the Medieval age.

Some of the writing is superfluous, as Gilson repeats himself longwindedly. Also Gilson seems to be inconsistent in the final pronouncement upon whether Abelard submitted his soul's salvation to Heloise's prayers or the joy of sacrifice to God.

In the recent hardcover edition which I have, the dates of printing of Thorstein Veblen's book IMPERIAL GERMANY AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION are listed as 1915, 1939, and 1964. In the first two years listed, America was safely sitting on the sidelines, observing the kind of warlike behavior attributed to the dynastic state in this book in Europe, much as Elizabethan England enjoyed several centuries of isolation from the wars which were devastating Europe in the years in which its economic activities became industrial, though socially, as Veblen observed, "Conventions that are in some degree effete continue to cumber the ground." (p. 30). By 1964, America was playing such a large role in the world that Germany might have been the kind of problem that America, from a unique position of political and military superiority, ought to have been able to resolve, and possibly did by acting as if the major problems in the world were somewhere else.

Chapter I, Introductory -- Races and Peoples, compares the mixture of races which populated England and Germany to be quite similar, if not exactly the same. A note on page 23, in Chapter 2, The Old Order, compares such mixing with what occurred in Japan, "and possibly also the Aegean peoples of antiquity." "By a curious coincidence, the period of Japanese prehistory and history seems to cover loosely the same general interval of time as that of the Baltic peoples; and as with the latter, so in the case of the Japanese, the cultural life-history of the people is a history of facile and ubiquitous borrowing done in the most workmanlike manner and executed with the most serviceable effect."

In the chapter on The Dynastic State, Veblen notes that printing was a handicraft which was well practiced in Germany, and included "the circulation of obnoxious literature that purveys excessively modern ideas" (note on p. 76), but that it appeared to be best "to engender that habit of reading as to make the assimilation of the new industrial order an easy matter, resulting in a marked advance in efficiency and physical comfort, and then to temper coercion with a well-conceived cajolery." (note, p. 76).

One of the pleasures of reading Veblen is encountering philosophical ideas in an utterly different context, as on page 109:

. . . While the corresponding English movement, in so far as touches the point here in question, has tended strongly to an atheistic and unmoral scheme of opaque and impersonal matter of fact. This work of the human spirit as it has come into play under the German habituation is spoken of as "nobler," "profounder,"--a point not to be disputed, since such discrimination is invidious and is an affair of taste and perspective.

The final paragraph of the chapter on The Case of England is devoted to the "direct waste of time and substance involved in this ubiquitous addiction to sports." (p. 148). I enjoy Veblen's offhandedly remarkable description of how "persons with a predilection for artistic and intellectual dissipations may be moved to deprecate addiction to dissipations of this crude and brutalizing nature," (p. 148) but this book deserves far more serious readers than I am.

Political Heretics echoes a style found in the writing of Will Durant. Though a historical review of the political origins and offshoots of the World through the 1950's, it is by no means just another dull history book. Nomad writes as if he knew Bakunin, Marx, and the countless other characters found in his book personally. Nomad's commanding knowledge and personable writing offer the reader a chance to truly understand the subject, and subjects, found within the pages of Political Heretics.

I've never read a better "non-technical" book on the social, and often personal, development of a/political movements. It's too bad that much of Nomad's knowledge has disappeared from contemporary texts.

At the present time, Amazon.com is not listing that it's not just Edwards, but specifically, Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), the same one that wrote "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God". Thus, he is strongly classically evangelical, believing in the doctrines of original sin, love for God... and subsequent Christian teachings such as love for enemy, love for neighbor.

The summary of the book for those versed in virtue ethics is that Jonathan Edwards comes out as an agape-virtue ethicist. He thinks of the highest virtue of love ("The General nature of true virtue is love", p.85), which he does not name as agape, but that he does describe as unconditional love towards God, and then proceeding from this virtue, the true virtue of love of neighbor.

It's a rather difficult read, and unlike a lot of sermons which have a flow in argument or repeat their points over and over, and wrap up with a conclusion, Edwards more makes multiple stabs at various points.

Virtue, to Edwards, is the beauty of the quality and exercises of the heart, or those actions which proceed from them (p.2), and true virtue most essentially consists in benevolence to being in general (p.3). Thus, virtue most essentially consists in love (that is to say, that true virtue should inspire acts of love, but acts of love may not be representative of true nature), and true beauty is also the individual's harmony to the universe. There is also a distinction between love of complacence (almost similar to 'eros'), which presupposes beauty, and love of benevolence (specifically looking at God's love, which is not limited to things we consider beautiful). Thus, God's love is uncondition, which is linked to His character, exemplifying true virtue. Also, true virtue is not related to love of gratitude or reciprocity.

Agape love is also explained here, as the 'highest good of the object of love,' 'the highest good of all over the good of one,' and 'opposition of evil'. A number of these are further expounded in chapter 1.

"True virtue must chiefly consist in love to God," Jonathan Edwards declares (p.14). And the secondary ground of love is moral excellency. Edwards also links that the love of God supremely is causal (and linked) with loving others, loving one's neighbor. But true goodness is tied into the purpose of glorifying God (p.25). And then morality must be God-focused and then subordinately benevolent (p. 26)

Chapter 3, Edwards talks about primary beauties, such as benevolence, and virtues (or beauties) of justice, wisdom, and secondary beauties such as regularity, order, symmetry, proportion, harmony, etc., as external beauty reflects true spiritual beauty.

It should be noted that Edwards has a few anachronistic terms, such as "self-love" -- which is not narcissism, but it is "love for our own happiness" (p.44) or "love to himself with respect to his private interest" (p.45). Self-love causes us to love those who either help us or promote our interests, and Edwards argues that this could develop a moral sense (of good/bad) (p. 51).

One of Edward's strongest assumptions is that of original sin, that man is not capable of true virtue (i.e., loving God, and thus others) because of original sin, and that anger is not a good illustrator of virtue due to this original sin (depravity of man). He also describes this "true negative moral goodness" (p.91) in all men which also mistake things for true virtue, as well as desire wickedness or do wickedness, or have moral insensibility, or stupidity of conscience. He goes on to say that "all sin has its source from selfishness, or self-love not subordinate to a regard to being in general" (p.92) -- primarily resulting in resentment from God.

Yet, genuine virtues restrain the advance of sin (namely pride and sensuality, p.96).