320p large format hardback, worn and aged dustjacket, well preserved copy, without name or stamps, very good

Human Hope and the Death Instinct: An Exploration of Psychoanalytical Theories of Human Nature and Their Implications for Culture and Education

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Holbrook. David

Psychology & Counseling

Pergamon Pr

The masks of hate;: The problem of false solutions in the culture of an acquisitive society (The Pergamon English library)

Pergamon Press

Under the influence of science, modern civilization has adopted the view that only things that can be verified empirically or arrived at rationally are true. Modern people tend to regard themselves as mechanisms, without any subjective aspects to their nature. In this insightful and passionately concerned book, British educationist and man of letters David Holbrook retorts persuasively that this reductive view of human nature is profoundly false. Man's inner, subjective life is essential to his nature, what happens to his consciousness is the most important thing in his life, and his greatest need is to find meaning.Holbrook also warns that reductionism has pernicious, even lethal, cultural, social, and political consequences. The logical result is nihilism: if human beings and existence are but physical mechanisms, it necessarily follows that consciousness does not exist, life is meaningless, our concern with moral values is pointless, and so are our lives and actions. Life itself reduces to nothing but self-indulgence and self-assertion. A culture informed by this perspective is necessarily full of expressions of hate and meaninglessness, which coarsens and demoralizes the majority of the population and worsens the mental pathologies of unstable persons. "Egoistical nihilism" becomes ever more widespread, and a decent society becomes impossible.Holbrook advances a keenly insightful and eloquent critique of the radical individualism of Max Stirner's famous tract The Ego and His Own. Stirner's worldview, he argues, is grounded in psychopathology and takes the nihilist assumptions of modernity to their logical conclusion: "the unique one" totally detached from society and reducing others to mere means to his ends, fair game for exploitation unfettered by ethical considerations. Ominously, he notes, the Stirnerean attitude toward existence is becoming increasingly common. Against the reductive perspective of positivism, Holbrook argues that scientific investigations establish the reality of meaning and of values rooted in love. He calls for a reaffirmation of both.Originally published in 1977, Education, Nihilism, and Survival speaks prophetically and even more urgently to us today. The worsening coarseness, nihilism, and brutality of our culture, the partisan fanaticisms and widespread alienation and apathy of our politics, and horrors such as school shootings reveal the consequences of radical individualism.Education, Nihilism, and Survival will be of interest to well-educated general readers concerned at the state of culture and society; educators alarmed at harmful approaches in education; and psychologists and philosophers concerned about existentialism, Stirner's egoist philosophy, and the need for meaningful, philosophical anthropology.

Education, Nihilism and Survival

Darton,Longman & Todd Ltd.

Sex and dehumanization in art, thought and life in our time

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Pitman

Evolution and the Humanities

Science & Math

Evolution

PALGRAVE~MACMILLAN

<p>St. Martin's Press 1991. Hardcover with dust jacket. No marks, no issues. Professor's private library.</p>

Edith Wharton and the Unsatisfactory Man (Critical Studies Series)

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

A thought-provoking work, The Novel and Authenticity examines such novels as Austen's Mansfield Park, Forster's A Passage to India, and Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning to demonstrate its thesis. The reader will come away from this book with a new perspective on the novel and on contemporary literary theorizing.

The Novel and Authenticity (Critical Studies Series)

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Plucking the rushes: An anthology of Chinese poetry in translations,

Pound, Ezra.

Waley,Arthur

William Heinemann

Mr Holbrook here offers a new interpretation of Dylan Thomas which seeks, by uncovering the roots of his predicament as man and artist, to show what is of lasting value in his achievement. This undertaking involves the consideration of some profound questions of human personality and of human creativity and its denial.

Dylan Thomas: the code of night

Athlone Press

Admirers of the work of Sylvia Plath will welcome this new paperback edition of a study, first published by The Athlone Press in 1976, which provides coherent and persuasive readings of her poetry. Drawing upon the traditional skills of the literary critic, David Holbrook also deploys the illumination of both psychoanalysis and phenomenology in a pioneering work of literary, individual and cultural interpretation.

Sylvia Plath: Poetry and existence

distributed by Humanities Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Holbrook. David. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Holbrook. David