This highly readable volume offers a broad introduction to modern philosophy and philosophers. Ben-Ami Scharfstein contends that personal experience, especially that of childhood, affects philosophers' sense of reality and hence the content of their philosophies. He bases his argument on biographical studies of twenty great philosophers, beginning with Descartes and ending with Wittgenstein and Sartre. Taken together, these studies provide the beginnings of a psychological history of the philosophy of the period.
Scharfstein first focuses on the philosophers' efforts to arrive at the...

Scharfstein describes the extraordinary powers that have been attributed to language everywhere, and then looks at ineffability as it has appeared in the thought of the great philosophical cultures: India, China, Japan, and the West. He argues that there is something of our prosaic, everyday difficulty with words in the ineffable reality of the philosophers and theologians, just as there is something unformulable, and finally mysterious in the prosaic, everyday successes and failures of words.

A Comparative History of World Philosophy presents a personal yet balanced guide through what the author argues to be the three great philosophical traditions: Chinese, European, and Indian. The book breaks through the cultural barriers between these traditions, proving that despite their considerable differences, fundamental resemblances exist in their abstract principles. Ben-Ami Scharfstein argues that Western students of philosophy will profit considerably if they study Indian and Chinese philosophy from the very beginning, along with their own.

Written with clarity and infused with...

In The Dilemma of Context, Scharfstein contends that the problems encountered with context are insoluble. He explains why this problem lays an intellectual burden on us that, while remaining inescapable, can become so heavy it destroys the understandingit was created to further.

Drawn by invitation from a number of countries, a group of scholars undertakes to explore the means by which the very attempt to grasp religions leads to a repeated process of internal reinterpretation and, often, transformation. Essays on interpretation in religion in general are followed by essays that probe various hermeneutical aspects of ancient Egyptian religion, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The range of these essays is impressive -- from semiosis, problems of translation, and the pragmatic assignment of meaning, to prayer, divine commands, the invisibility ascribed to...

Myths and Fictions -- the third in a series of books on comparative philosophy and religion -- is a collection of original essays, none previously published, on the theory and the actuality of myths and fictions in the different cultures of the world. Through all the essays there runs the question of the relation of literal truth to truth conceived in other ways or dimensions. Taken as a whole, the book makes a serious attempt to get beyond the confines of any single culture and enter into the mythical imagination of the ancient Hindus, Chinese, Hebrews and Christians, and by this act...

What if Immanuel Kant floated down from his transcendental heights, straight through Alice s rabbit hole, and into the fabulous world of Lewis Carroll? For Ben-Ami Scharfstein this is a wonderfully instructive scenario and the perfect way to begin this wide-ranging collection of decades of startlingly synthesized thought. Combining a deep knowledge of psychology, cultural anthropology, art history, and the history of religionsnot to mention philosophyhe demonstrates again and again the unpredictability of writing and thought and how they can teach us about our experiences.
Scharfstein...