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Author Zwicky, Jan, 1955- author.

Title Once upon a time in the West : essays on the politics of thought and imagination / Jan Zwicky
Published Montreal ; Kingston ; London ; Chicago : McGill-Queen's University Press, 2023

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Description 1 online resource
Contents Cover -- Half Title Page -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Contents -- Preface -- Auden as Philosopher: How Poets Think -- Wilderness and Agriculture -- Once upon a Time in the West: Heidegger and the Poets -- Lyric Realism: Nature Poetry, Silence, and Ontology -- The Ethics of the Negative Review -- Defenders of the Faith -- I Know What I Like ! And Nobody's Going to Tell Me Different -- It's a Free Country, Isn't It ? -- What about Bad Books? -- The Art of the Review -- Integrity and Ornament -- The Novels of Pascal: A Review of Correction by Thomas Bernhard
Being Will Be Here, Beauty Will Be Here, But This Beauty That Visits Us Now Will Be Gone -- A Note on Jane Jacobs's Systems of Survival, or Why We Will Not Be Able to Prevent Global Ecological Collapse -- On Rules and Moral Beauty -- Lyric, Narrative, Memory -- The Syntax of Ethical Style -- Ethics and Narrative -- Ontological Attention and Lyric Form -- Frost and Snow -- Haydn's F-Flat -- Acknowledgements -- Notes -- References -- Index
Summary "Western civilization is over. So begins Jan Zwicky's trenchant exploration of the roots of global cultural and ecological collapse: a way of thinking that is also linked to some of the West's most noted achievements. The Renaissance merged imperial enterprise with Islamic algebra and recently recovered Greek mathematics to precipitate mechanized industry and resource extraction; these in turn made possible the growth of capitalism, the military-industrial complex, and Big Technology. Despite its self-image as objective, Zwicky argues, the West's style of thought is not politically neutral, but intensely anthropocentric. It has led those who adopt it to regard the more-than-human world as nothing more than timber licences and drilling sites, where value is not recognized unless it is monetized. Oblivious to context and blind to big-picture thinking, it analyzes, mechanizes, digitizes, and systematizes, while rejecting empathy and compassion as distorting influences. Lyric comprehension, in Zwicky's view, offers an alternative to this way of thinking, and she provides a wide range of examples. Once Upon a Time in the West documents how a narrow epistemological style has left Western thought blind to critical features of reality, and how the terrifying consequences of that blinkered vision are now beginning to unfold."-- Provided by publisher
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Print version record
Subject Philosophy.
Knowledge, Theory of.
Civilization, Western -- 21st century -- Philosophy
Philosophy
philosophy.
epistemology.
PHILOSOPHY / Movements / Critical Theory
Civilization, Western -- Philosophy.
Knowledge, Theory of.
Philosophy.
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9780228018292
9780228018308
0228018307
0228018293