Although there are many books on Samuel Johnson's moral and religious thought, none have managed to provide a complete analysis of his relationship to the ethics and theology of the eighteenth-century. This major new study examines the background to Johnson's views on a wide range of issues that were debated by the philosophers and divines of the age, emphasizing the ambivalence and contradiction inherent in his orthodoxy, while challenging the assumption that his religious beliefs were unstable and filled with anxiety.

Peace, compared to war, receives scant attention. Comprised of nine essays drawn from a 2009 conference, the essays collected in Visions of Peace: Asia and the West, edited by Takashi Shogimen and Vicki A. Spencer, reach wide and far to push against that neglect. The essays focus on different conceptions of and plans for political peace. Even more impressively, they generally avoid well-trodden paths like Kant’s Toward Perpetual Peace and instead draw upon Asian traditions and more obscure Western traditions. The (...) first essay, for instance, discusses the Greek goddess of peace and, contra various modern scholars, how peace was in fact an ideal for the Greeks and thought to be achievable. The final essay is on Jeremy... (shrink)

This book argues for the importance of writing to conceptions of language, technology, and civilization in the early modern era.

Guo Cheen’s Translating Totality in Parts: Chengguan’s Commentaries and Subcommentaries to the Avatamsaka Sutra translates the first of eighty fascicles or juan of Chengguan’s A Compilation of the Commentaries and Subcommentaries to the Flower Ornament Sutra with Greatly Proper and Extensive Discourses by the Buddhas as well as the preface to his The Meanings Proclaimed in the Subcommentaries Accompanying the Commentaries to the Flower Ornament Sutra with Greatly Proper and Extensive Discourses by the Buddha. Guo Cheen translates the preface first, (...) as it explains why Chengguan wrote his commentaries. The Compilation itself is composed by combining his Commentaries to the Avatamsaka.. (shrink)