Autorentext

Emile Alexandrov is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tyumen. He works in American Transcendentalism, Graeco-Arabic, and Buddhist metaphysics. He authored The Other Platonist Beginning: Heidegger and Neoplatonism (2024), edited Buddhism and Neoplatonism I (2025), and is a co-director of the biennial International Symposium on Buddhism and Neoplatonism.

Steve Stakland is Professor of Philosophy and Department Chair at Northern Virginia Community College. He specializes in the phenomenology of education. He authored Exploring What Is Lost in the Online Undergraduate Experience (2023) and edited The Phenomenology of Play (2024).

Klappentext

This volume presents Ralph Waldo Emerson's engagement with diverse philosophical traditions with the concurrent aim of showing the contemporary relevance of his Transcendentalism.

As scholarship increasingly centers on Emerson's place within American philosophy, this collection offers fresh insights into the expansive reach of his thought across Western and Eastern traditions, spanning the nineteenth century to the present. Featuring comparative analyses and innovative applications of Transcendentalism, it connects Emerson's ideas to global philosophies, religions, and cultures. Thematically organized into three parts, the volume first situates Emerson within Romanticism and Platonism. Part 2 examines his metaphysics and his intersections with both Eastern and Western religious thought. Finally, Part 3 applies his philosophy to education, aesthetics, environmental ethics, and politics. The cosmopolitan essays in this collection situate Emerson not only within Western thought but also in dialogue with Greek, Buddhist, Islamic, and Ved ntic philosophies. Geared primarily toward scholars and advanced students, though accessible to well-informed casual readers, the contributions are meticulously researched and calibrated for specialists in American philosophy, literature, religious studies, and Emerson's oeuvre.

Emerson's Affinities is essential reading for scholars and graduate students in American Transcendentalism, literature, philosophy, and religious studies.

Inhalt

Introduction Part 1: Emerson, Platonism and Romanticism 1. Emerson on Plato and Shakespeare: Intelligence and Weak Ties 2. Emerson and German Idealism 3. Emerson's Anti-Scientistic Naturalism 4. Genial-Heat Imagination: John James Audubon's Proto-Transcendentalist Sentimentalism 5. A Comparative Hermeneutic: Coleridge, Emerson, and Peirce on the Inexhaustibly Re-Ebullient Potency of the Creative Imagination 6. Emerson: "Nature's God Neoplatonized" 7. Emerson's Transparent Eyeball, a Genealogy: Coleridge, Emerson, Muir Part 2: Emerson, Religion and Metaphysics 8. Emerson, Progenitor of Independent American Spiritual Teachers 9. Nature in the Neoplatonism of Emerson and Al-Kind **10. The Over-Soul of Nature: Emerson's Transcendental Philosophy and Ved nta 11. Between the Over-Soul and Buddhahood: Emerson's Engagement with Nineteenth-Century Buddhist Discourse

12. Emerson's "Pure Plastic Idea" and the Indefinite Dyad of the Platonic Heritage Part 3: Emerson, Art, Ethics, and Education 13. Let's Play with Symbols: Emersonian Filmmaking Within Hybrid Cinema 14. To Thrill and Agitate: Complex Figuration in Emerson and Lovecraft 15. Subject as Sepulchre: Identity and the Emptying of Tradition in Emerson's 21st Century 16. Fichte, Emerson, Stiegler, and the Rediscovery of the Immanent, Self-Culture in the Era of Dissipation 17. The Floundering of American Education: Emerson's Influence on John Dewey 18. Can Philosophy Save America? 19. An Emersonian Approach to the Climate Crisis 20. Hermeneutic Circle: Emerson, Peirce, Heidegger