Lost Intimacy in American Thought: Recovering Personal Philosophy from Thoreau to Cavell

Introduction; Thinking from Imagination and the Heart; Part One: Bugbee, Thoreau, And Cavell; A Philosophy in Wilderness; When Philosophy Becomes Lyric; On Death and the Sublime; Becoming What We Pray; Two Testimonies: Stanley Cavell and Henry Bugbee; Part Two: Five Praising Explorations; Stanley Cavell: Acknowledgment, Suffering and Praise; Bruce Wilshire: Primal Roots and Hungers; Henry James: An Ethics of Intimate Conversation; Singing from the Heart of the Humanities; J. Glenn Grey and Hannah Arendt: Poetry in Time of War; Thoreau: Lilies and Raising John Brown; Conclusions.

Offers a critique of rationalism in contemporary American thought by recovering a lost tradition of intimacy in American philosophical writing.

"This book is a work of love, in which a group of extraordinary thinkers are defended as exemplars of authentic philosophy and united as part of an alternative canon. True to the spirit of his epigraph from Ortega, Edward Mooney devotes careful attention to these American philosophers and their ideas, unveiling and thus demonstrating their significance. Lost Intimacy In American Thought subverts the myth of impersonal reflection, the assumption that philosophers should write books without being writers, and 'the apathetic fallacy, ' as Mooney aptly terms it, which arises from the belief that reality is factual but not valuable. In fact, as Mooney shows, the world is a place that overflows with meaning in ways that our best philosophers have sought to understand and account for - and to develop a significant philosophical vision of reality, as Mooney convincingly argues, is nothing less than a sacred task. Apart from Alphonso Lingis, no one other than Mooney has done so much to bring a lyric voice to contemporary philosophy. Readers who are just discovering Mooney's work will be in for a delightful surprise, and those who have admired his writings on the existential tradition will enjoy a new and distinctive addition to his corpus. This is truly an essential text." Rick Anthony Furtak, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Colorado College, USA