Why Liberals and Conservatives Clash offers an explanation for the extreme polarization between liberal and conservative that is the hallmark of the American political landscape today. It suggests that liberal thought is intrinsically different from conservative thought, and that each constitutes a self-subsistent world-view with its specific qualities and rules. The book offers a set of guidelines to predict a person's views based on other views s/he holds, given that each world-view is what it is for structural reasons, and is more than merely a sum of discrete positions. It explains, for...

Why Liberals and Conservatives Clash offers an explanation for the extreme polarization between liberal and conservative that is the hallmark of the American political landscape today. It suggests that liberal thought is intrinsically different from conservative thought, and that each constitutes a self-subsistent world-view with its specific qualities and rules. The book offers a set of guidelines to predict a person's views based on other views s/he holds, given that each world-view is what it is for structural reasons, and is more than merely a sum of discrete positions. It explains, for...

Sexual Ethics considers the traditional Western views, as well as Freudian explanations, of sexuality. Author Bruce E. Fleming proposes that sex operates in an intrinsically undefined area, one stranded between the two realms that otherwise define our public and private lives. The most heated debate regarding sexual matters is between liberal and conservatives. Whether or not these two groups can continue to co-exist under the umbrella of American democracy depends on their willingness to adhere to the basic principals of democracy.

In his new work, Disappointment, Bruce Fleming starts from the realization that even objective views of the world are so only under specific circumstances. Subjects range from war and the nature of explanation systems such as science and astrology to a concept Fleming calls "coloring." When we identify coloring, it seems to us that a single quality of something larger has eclipsed all its other qualities for example, skin color or sexual orientation coming to stand for the whole much more complex individual. Once identified, coloring can be questioned and rejected. However, to eliminate...

Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was informed by the belief that it was possible to get clarity once and for all on fundamental philosophical issues, and so to think our way to a silence where philosophy was no longer necessary. This is The New Tractatus: it sympathizes with Wittgenstein's impatience with the endless cycle of argument, but reacts to this impatience and takes it in different directions than Wittgenstein did. Wittgenstein was concerned with questions like these: What is the meaning of language? What is our relationship to the universe? What is the nature of...

Many otherwise competent adults are wobbly writers, whether they're college students or already thriving in a job. They probably exhibit a 'go get 'em' attitude for most of their lives, but find themselves stumped by a blank computer screen or a piece of paper. What, they wonder, do I do now? What's my next word, next sentence? But their problems aren't solved by somebody telling them what to do, only by someone helping them figure things out themselves. As the adage says: give a person a fish and s/he eats that day; teach a person to fish and s/he eats for life. They need a little help from...

What is the taste of life as we really live it, rather than the way we imagine it in others? What does it feel like to become aware of the hand of cards we've been dealt, to play them as well as we can, to understand what has happened to us, and to try to control the future? Journey to the Middle of the Forest answers these questions in a way that celebrity memoirs, where events seem so much more intense than happenings in our own lives because of our perspective and the writer's fame, cannot. In Journey to the Middle of the Forest, Bruce Fleming considers the slippages between presupposition...

The Aesthetic Sense of Life is a fast-moving book about how to see the world and get value from living every day with the "everyday." Do the infinite number of sensations we're surrounded with every day have intrinsic value? If not, what gives them value? Who appreciates the sunrise if we don't? Is it enough for just us to appreciate it? Or do we have to share it? The Aesthetic Sense of Life considers and answers to questions such as these in clear, readable prose, offering a way of looking at life that makes clear its value and its meaning. The aesthetic sense of life is neither the...

What if Plato's Symposium took place in present-day America rather than in ancient Athens? The Thanksgiving Symposium imagines this, and makes it happen. Like Plato's dialogue, The Thanksgiving Symposium focuses on the age-old question: what is the nature of love? In The Thanksgiving Symposium, three men and three women of varying ages and degrees of closeness meet for Thanksgiving dinner. Their particular situations give rise to a discussion of love in the general and the specific, leavened with the normal give and take of social interaction. During the evening, much is discussed and some...

Homage to Eugene O'Neill re-invokes O'Neill's own muses to offer a re-conception of his artistic world, a re-enactment, and an entirely new work not so much in the style but in the spirit of the Nobel-prize winning American dramatist.