St. Matthew Passion is Hans Blumenberg's sustained and devastating meditation on Jesus's anguished cry on the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Why did this abandonment happen, what does it mean within the logic of the Gospels, how have believers and nonbelievers understood it, and how does it live on in art? With rare philological acuity and vast historical learning, Blumenberg unfolds context upon context in which this cry has r...

In this collection of short meditations on various topics, Hans Blumenberg eschews academic ponderousness and writes in a genre evocative of Montaigne's Essais, Walter Benjamin's Denkbilder, or Adorno's Minima Moralia. Drawing upon an intellectual tradition that ranges from Aesop to Wittgenstein and from medieval theology to astrophysics, he works as a detective of ideas scouring the periphery of intellectual and philosophical history for clues—metaphors, gesture...

Sports surface design is crucial for the successful performance of sports skills and the reduction of injury risk. Surfaces have developed from natural materials such as turf, clay and cinder, to synthetic surfaces such as acrylic tennis courts, artificial turf for soccer and synthetic running tracks, while our understanding of natural turf has developed in terms of properties appropriate for different sports and surface sustainability. This book draws together the very latest research on ...

Following Hegel's analysis of art's increasing difficulty to both engage and extricate itself from prosaic reality, Paul Fleming investigates the strategies employed by German literature from 1750 to 1850 for increasingly attuning itself to quotidian life—common heroes, everyday life, non-extraordinary events—while also avoiding all notions of mediocrity. He focuses on three sites of this tension: the average audience (Lessing), the average artist (Goethe and Schiller), and the everyday, o...

It is now accepted that the world’s climate has warmed by about 0.5°C over the past one hundred years and will continue to warm by as much as 6°C by the end of the current century. What, however, do such fundamental changes actually mean for life and the economy at the local and regional scales for the industrialized nations? This extensive study represents a state-of-the-art regional assessment of the impacts of climate change in an industrialized European nation. Providing a comprehens...

Prepare to embark on a literary odyssey with "The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 (Unabridged)." This captivating anthology showcases the timeless masterpieces of renowned poets from across the globe. From the lyrical sonnets of Shakespeare to the evocative verses of Emily Dickinson, this volume offers a symphony of words that will ignite your imagination and stir your soul. Immerse yourself in the depths of human emotion, explore the wonders of nature, and witness the transformative power o...

It has been described as a "tame longing without any particular object" by Schopenhauer, "a bestial and indefinable affliction" by Dostoevsky, and "time's invasion of your world system" by Joseph Brodsky, but still very few of us today can explain precisely what boredom is. A Philosophy of Boredom investigates one of the central preoccupations of our age as it probes the nature of boredom, how it originated, how and why it afflicts us, and why we cannot seem to overcome it by any ...

A rich and evocative study of one of modern history's most compelling and controversial philosophers by a literary and critical grand masterIn Martin Heidegger, George Steiner delves into the life and work of the prolific German philosopher. His deft analysis lays bare the intricacies of Heidegger's work and his influence on modern society, offering a clear and accessible analysis of the philosopher's more difficult ideas, from the human condition and lang...

This volume presents two important lecture cycles delivered after WWII, exploring the poetry of Hölderlin and the nature of thought itself.Heidegger delivered his lecture series, Insight into That Which Is, at Bremen in 1949. It was his first speaking engagement after World War II, when he was officially banned from teaching. Here, Heidegger openly resumes thinking that deeply engaged him with Hölderlin's poetry and themes developed in his earlier works.

We live in an age of distraction. Contemporary analyses of culture, politics, techno-science, and psychology insist on this. They often suggest remedies for it, or ways to capitalize on it. Yet they almost never investigate the meaning and history of distraction itself. This book corrects this lack of attention. It inquires into the effects of distraction, defined not as the opposite of attention, but as truly discontinuous intellect. Human being has to be reconceived, according to this ar...

"The Myth of Sisyphus" by Albert Camus is a philosophical exploration of absurdism, existentialism, and the human condition within French literature. Through the lens of the ancient myth of Sisyphus, Camus delves into the depths of existential crisis and rebellion against the absurdity of life. He examines the meaning of existence, confronting nihilism and the inherent absurdity of the universe. Camusian philosophy emphasizes the absurdity of human existence and the individual's struggle t...

This classic is the benchmark against which all modern books about Nietzsche are measured. When Walter Kaufmann wrote it in the immediate aftermath of World War II, most scholars outside Germany viewed Nietzsche as part madman, part proto-Nazi, and almost wholly unphilosophical. Kaufmann rehabilitated Nietzsche nearly single-handedly, presenting his works as one of the great achievements of Western philosophy.Responding to the powerful myths and countermyths that had sprung up arou...