Kitcher, P: Deaths in Venice

List of IllustrationsPrefaceList of AbbreviationsA Note on Translations1. Discipline2. Beauty3. ShadowsNotesIndex

Philip Kitcher is the John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University and the author of numerous books and articles, including Science in a Democratic Society, The Ethical Project, and Preludes to Pragmatism: Toward a Reconstruction of Philosophy.

Philip Kitcher's short book on "Deaths in Venice" is a profession of love: for Thomas Mann's novella, for Mahler's music, and above all for the commitment to ideas and reflections on life that a certain current of German culture represented in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One senses that Kitcher has so completely immersed himself in the works of Thomas Mann, in Mahler's music, in their biographies, and to an extent in the eponymous works by Britten and Visconti, that he speaks from within these works and lives. -- Mark M. Anderson, Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Columbia University Unusually rich, rewarding, and astounding in its range, Deaths in Venice asks im-portant philosophical questions -- about art's demands on its practitioners, its con-nections to the rest of life, and the possibility of endowing our short, evanescent lives with some lasting significance -- through Thomas Mann's great novella, its variations in opera and film, and the music of Gustav Mahler. More than reaching conclusions, these works provide beginnings: examples of new human possibilities that are not to be imitated but transcended -- and that, in large part, is how the book itself proceeds. This is much more that a work on the philosophy of art: in Deaths in Venice, Philip Kitcher does philosophy with art. -- Alexander Nehamas, Princeton University Philip Kitcher's Deaths in Venice is an intimate study on Thomas Mann, 'the man and his work' as the formula has been in classical literary criticism. At the same time, however, it is a thorough discussion of the possible relation of literature, and art in general, to philosophical thinking. It is this double intensity of perspectives -- a double intensity that is never sacrificed in the one or the other direction -- which makes reading Deaths in Venice a unique experience. -- Rudiger Campe, Yale University Deaths in Venice is to the twenty-first century what Nietzsche's literary and musical criticism was to