Author: Alan Lightman File Type: epub In this timely and essential book that offers a fresh take on the qualms of modern day life, Professor Alan Lightman investigates the creativity born from allowing our minds to freely roam, without attempting to accomplish anything and without any assigned tasks. We are all worried about wasting time. Especially in the West, we have created a frenzied lifestyle in which the twenty-four hours of each day are carved up, dissected, and reduced down to ten minute units of efficiency. We take our iPhones and laptops with us on vacation. We check email at restaurants or our brokerage accounts while walking in the park. When the school day ends, our children are overloaded with extras. Our university curricula are so crammed our young people dont have time to reflect on the material they are supposed to be learning. Yet in the face of our time-driven existence, a great deal of evidence suggests there is great value in wasting time, of letting the mind lie fallow for some periods, of letting minutes and even hours go by without scheduled activities or intended tasks. Gustav Mahler routinely took three or four-hour walks after lunch, stopping to jot down ideas in his notebook. Carl Jung did his most creative thinking and writing when he visited his country house. In his 1949 autobiography, Albert Einstein described how his thinking involved letting his mind roam over many possibilities and making connections between concepts that were previously unconnected. With In Praise of Wasting Time, Professor Alan Lightman documents the rush and heave of the modern world, suggests the technological and cultural origins of our time-driven lives, and examines the many values of wasting timefor replenishing the mind, for creative thought, and for finding and solidifying the inner self. Break free from the idea that we must not waste a single second, and discover how sometimes the best thing to do is to do nothing at all.**ReviewOur most important human capacities for creativity and our relationships to ourselves and others are under attack by our preoccupation with our devices. We need new practices to turn this around and reclaim our humanity. But here Lightmans special achievement is to make this familiar story come alive with personal urgency and new clarity. What has for too long seemed like a contentious position is here presented as compassionate common sense. For isnt it simple common sense to do what will makes us stay human?It is good to hear a call to arms expressed so beautifully. Bravo. SHERRY TURKLE, Abby Rockefeller Mauze Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology, MIT, and author ofReclaiming Conversation The Power of Talk in A Digital Age. About the Author Alan Lightman is a physicist, novelist, and essayist. He was educated at Princeton University and at the California Institute of Technology, where he received a PhD in theoretical physics. Lightman is the author of five novels, including the international bestseller Einsteins Dreams, two collections of essays, a book-length narrative poem, and several books on science. His writing has appeared inThe Atlantic,Granta, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books, among other publications.

Author: Jean-Francois Kervegan File Type: pdf One of Hegels most controversial and confounding claims is that the real is rational and the rational is real. In this book, one of the worlds leading scholars of Hegel, Jean-Francois Kervegan, offers a thorough analysis and explanation of that claim, along the way delivering a compelling account of modern social, political, and ethical life. Kervegan begins with Hegels term objective spirit, the public manifestation of our deepest commitments, the binding norms that shape our existence as subjects and agents. He examines objective spirit in three realms the notion of right, the theory of society, and the state. In conversation with Tocqueville and other theorists of democracy, whether in the Anglophone world or in Europe, Kervegan shows how Hegeloften associated with grand metaphysical ideasactually had a specific conception of civil society and the state. In Hegels view, public institutions represent the fulfillment of deep subjective needsand in that sense, demonstrate that the real is the rational, because what surrounds us is the product of our collective mindedness. This groundbreaking analysis will guide the study of Hegel and nineteenth-century political thought for years to come.**ReviewKervegans book is a powerful, deeply informed, and compellingly relevant reading of Hegels theory of objective spirit. Since it is the most philosophically ambitious and most compelling commentary on Hegels theory of objective spirit yet published in any language, it deserves to be at the center of any contemporary discussion of this issue in Hegel. That theory has been quite controversial since, for some, the mere fact that Hegel could propose a theory of objective spirit at all and not hold (as he did not) that such a social actuality was nothing but the effect or product of individual attitudes, beliefs, and acts of will was already to begin down a slippery slope that would lead inevitably to totalitarian excesses or at least a commitment to mystified metaphysical entities like Geist. Kervegan decisively refutes such a view, and shows in detail why such an anxiety is not justified.(Robert B. Pippin, University of Chicago) Jean-Francois KervegansThe Actual and the Rationalis hard to praise highly enough. It takes on both Hegels practical philosophy in the broadest sense as theory of action and practical reasoning and the stickier issues of historical and textual interpretation that surround Hegels work. Even for a Hegel scholar steeped in those texts and the secondary literature surrounding them, Kervegans treatment is refreshing and new.(Terry Pinkard, Georgetown University) Even though Hegels notion of objective spirit was probably his most important contribution to the development of social thought and political philosophy, until today it never got the solid and differentiated interpretation it clearly deserves. With this new book by Jean-Francois Kervegan, both a philosopher and legal scholar, we finally have what was neededa clearly written, well-argued, and farseeing reconstruction of what Hegel intended when understanding societal life as objectified spirit. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in finding out why Hegel is of importance for current debates within social, legal, and political philosophy.(Axel Honneth, Columbia University) About the Author Jean-Francois Kervegan is professor at the University Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne.Daniela Ginsburg is a translator who has translated many articles and books in the humanities and social sciences.Martin Shuster is assistant professor and chair of Judaic studies in the Center for Geographies of Justice at Goucher College. He is the author of New Television The Aesthetics and Politics of a Genre, also published by the University of Chicago Press.