Works by James Seaton
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- Dialectics: Freedom of Speech and Thought.James Seaton -1980 -Journal of the History of Ideas 41 (2):283.
- Beyond Cheering and Bashing: New Perspectives on the Closing of the American Mind.William K. Buckley &James Seaton -1992 - Popular Press.The debate over the central issue confronted in Closing--the role of the university and the liberal arts in the United States--has become increasingly urgent and contentious. The goal of this collection of essays is to consider what we can learn about the dilemmas confronting American culture through a consideration of both The Closing of the American Mind and the debate it has aroused. The contributors differ among themselves as to the validity of both the diagnoses and the solutions Bloom offers, (...) yet they do not engage in "Bloom-bashing" or hero-worship. The goal of the book is to place the debate over Closing into the larger context than can be achieved in a book review format. To provide the historical perspective that has been missing in the controversy over Bloom, included in this volume is Christopher Lasch's "The Great Experiment: Where Did it Go Wrong?" Also included are essays by other leading critics: John K. Roth, Frank Caucci, William K. Buckley, Milton R. Stern, Susan Bourgeois, Margaret C. Jones, Daniel Zins, Kenneth Alan Hovey, Bonnie A. Hain, John Peacock, Patricia L. Lundberg, Peter Siedlecki, Mark W. Roche, William Thickstun, Lorraine Clark, and Gerald Graff. This volume of essays does much to illuminate the issue surrounding The Closing of the American Mind. (shrink)
- The Moral of the Story: Literature and Public Ethics.J. Patrick Dobel,Henry T. Edmondson Iii,Gregory R. Johnson,Peter Kalkavage,Judith Lee Kissell,Peter Augustine Lawler,Alan Levine,Daniel J. Mahoney,Will Morrisey,Pádraig Ó Gormaile,Paul C. Peterson,Michael Platt,Robert M. Schaefer,James Seaton &Juan José Sendín Vinagre (eds.) -2000 - Lexington Books.The contributors to The Moral of the Story, all preeminent political theorists, are unified by their concern with the instructive power of great literature. This thought-provoking combination of essays explores the polyvalent moral and political impact of classic world literatures on public ethics through the study of some of its major figures-including Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Jane Austen, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Robert Penn Warren, and Dostoevsky. Positing the uniqueness of literature's ability to promote dialogue on salient moral and intellectual virtues, (...) editor Henry T. Edmonson III has culled together a wide-ranging exploration of such fundamental concerns as the abuse of authority, the nature of good leadership, the significance of "middle class virtues" and the needs of adolescents. This collection reinvigorates the study of classic literature as an endeavor that is not only personally intellectually satisfying, but also an inimitable and unique way to enrich public discourse. (shrink)Export citation
Bookmark - A Note on the Texts.James Seaton -2009 - InThe Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy and Character and Opinion in the United States. Yale University Press.No categories
- Contributors.James Seaton -2009 - InThe Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy and Character and Opinion in the United States. Yale University Press.No categories
- Contents.James Seaton -2009 - InThe Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy and Character and Opinion in the United States. Yale University Press.No categories
- Cultural Conservatism, Political Liberalism: From Criticism to Cultural Studies.James Seaton &Seaton James -1996 - University of Michigan Press.Examines whether cultural studies has been too dismissive of the tradition of literary-cultural criticism that preceded it.
- Chapter IV: Josiah Royce.James Seaton -2009 - InThe Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy and Character and Opinion in the United States. Yale University Press. pp. 64-80.No categories
- Chapter II: The Academic Environment.James Seaton -2009 - InThe Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy and Character and Opinion in the United States. Yale University Press. pp. 39-50.No categories
- Chapter I: The Moral Background.James Seaton -2009 - InThe Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy and Character and Opinion in the United States. Yale University Press. pp. 25-38.No categories
- Chapter III: William James.James Seaton -2009 - InThe Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy and Character and Opinion in the United States. Yale University Press. pp. 51-63.No categories
- Chapter VII: English Liberty in America.James Seaton -2009 - InThe Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy and Character and Opinion in the United States. Yale University Press. pp. 103-120.No categories
- Chapter V: Later Speculations.James Seaton -2009 - InThe Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy and Character and Opinion in the United States. Yale University Press. pp. 81-91.No categories
- Chapter VI: Materialism and Idealism in American Life.James Seaton -2009 - InThe Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy and Character and Opinion in the United States. Yale University Press. pp. 92-102.No categories
- Frontmatter.James Seaton -2009 - InThe Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy and Character and Opinion in the United States. Yale University Press.No categories
- Index.James Seaton -2009 - InThe Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy and Character and Opinion in the United States. Yale University Press. pp. 193-200.No categories
- Irving Babbitt and Cultural Renewal.James Seaton -2003 -Humanitas: Interdisciplinary journal (National Humanities Institute) 16 (1):4-14.No categories
- Irving Babbitt on Lincoln and Unionism.James Seaton -2002 -Humanitas 15 (1):59-68.No categoriesExport citation Bookmark
- Introduction: George Santayana—The Philosopher as Cultural Critic.James Seaton -2009 - InThe Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy and Character and Opinion in the United States. Yale University Press.No categories
- Joseph Conrad's Moral Imagination.James Seaton -2006 -Humanitas 19 (1-2):65-70.No categoriesExport citation Bookmark
- Literary Criticism From Plato to Postmodernism: The Humanistic Alternative.James Seaton -2014 - Cambridge University Press.This book offers a history of literary criticism from Plato to the present, arguing that this history can best be seen as a dialogue among three traditions - the Platonic, Neoplatonic, and the humanistic, originated by Aristotle. There are many histories of literary criticism, but this is the first to clarify our understanding of the many seemingly incommensurable approaches employed over the centuries by reference to the three traditions. Making its case by careful analyses of individual critics, the book argues (...) for the relevance of the humanistic tradition in the twenty-first century and beyond. (shrink)No categories
- Lyric Poetry, the Novel, and Revolution: Milan Kundera's Life is Elsewhere.James Seaton -2007 -Humanitas 20 (1-2):95.
- On the Future of the Humanistic Tradition in Literary Criticism.James Seaton -1998 -Humanitas 11 (1):4-13.No categoriesExport citation Bookmark
- Preface.James Seaton -2009 - InThe Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy and Character and Opinion in the United States. Yale University Press. pp. 23-24.No categories
- Richard Rorty’s Misleading Use of Santayana.James Seaton -2014 -Overheard in Seville 32 (32):63-70.
- Santayana and America: Bulletin of the Santayana Society.James Seaton -2008 -Overheard in Seville 26 (26):25-26.
- Santayana after September 11, 2001.James Seaton -2002 -Overheard in Seville 20 (20):1-7.
- The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy and Character and Opinion in the United States.James Seaton (ed.) -2009 - Yale University Press.This book brings together two seminal works by George Santayana, one of the most significant philosophers of the twentieth century: _Character and Opinion in the United States,_ which stands with Tocqueville’s _Democracy in America_ as one the most insightful works of American cultural criticism ever written, and “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” a landmark text of both philosophical analysis and cultural criticism. An introduction by James Seaton situates Santayana in the intellectual and cultural context of his own time. Four (...) additional essays include John Lachs on the ways Santayana’s understanding of “the soul of America” help explain the relative peace among nationalities and ethnic groups in the United States; Wilfred M. McClay on Santayana’s life of the mind as it relates to dominant trends in American culture; Roger Kimball on Santayana’s “most uncommon benefice, common sense”; and James Seaton on Santayana’s distinction between “English liberty” and “fierce liberty.” All the essays serve to highlight the relevance of Santayana’s ideas to current issues in American culture, including education, immigration, and civil rights. (shrink)
- The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy.James Seaton -2009 - InThe Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy and Character and Opinion in the United States. Yale University Press. pp. 1-20.No categories
- The Genteel Tradition and English Liberty.James Seaton -2009 - InThe Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy and Character and Opinion in the United States. Yale University Press. pp. 160-174.No categories
- The Heritage of Lincoln.James Seaton -2002 -Humanitas 15 (1):69-80.No categories
- Book Review: Myth, Truth and Literature: Towards a True Post- Modernism. [REVIEW]James Seaton -1996 -Philosophy and Literature 20 (1):264-266.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Myth, Truth and Literature: Towards a True Post-ModernismJames SeatonMyth, Truth and Literature: Towards a True Post-Modernism, by Colin Falck; xix & 208 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edition, 1994, $59.95 cloth, $16.95 paper.Colin Falck has written a book that seeks to bind a critique of postmodernism to a plan for salvaging what is best about it. He wants to devise “a true post-modernism,” because until now the (...) movement’s goal has been “the Abolition of Reality.”The critique is the stronger part of the book. Falck offers several reasons why the currently fashionable versions of postmodernism are unsatisfactory. Identifying it with “post-Saussurian theory” (p. xiii), Falck traces the fundamental mistake of postmodernism back to Saussure’s rejection of one linguistic theory in favor of another, sliding from the view that language is based on “the baptismal labeling of some kind of already-differentiated and pre-baptismally identifiable item of the world’s contents” (p. 22) to seeing it “as a disembodied and contextless process” (p. 11). To Falck, though, the notion that a rejection of the first requires an acceptance of the second seems “entirely fallacious.” And yet “the whole internally interdependent substructure of post-Saussurian literary theory” depends upon the unexamined assumption that the two are inextricable.Falck finds other instances in which poststructuralists leap from true but trivial premises to otherwise unsupported conclusions. Jacques Derrida, for example, moves from an uncontroversial rejection of theories about “fully-experienced ‘presence’” (p. 21) to the very different issue of the priority of speech over writing. The goal of such non sequiturs is “in effect the Abolition of Reality” (p. 31).Such abolitions are always subject to the refutation Samuel Johnson made to Berkeley’s idealism. Kicking a stone, he vindicated the materiality of the external world. Now any textbook will point out that Johnson’s gesture was not an argument, but Falck argues that gestures do indeed possess philosophical significance. Speech is prior to writing because it is in speech and the gestures that accompany it that the location of language within “our necessary embodiedness” (p. 115) is most evident. Exploring the implications of the thesis that “all knowledge must be based in bodily awareness” (p. 119) along lines suggested by Merleau-Ponty among others, Falck argues that any satisfying account of language and, especially, literature must take account of dimensions of experience that contemporary theory peremptorily dismisses with the slogan “Nothing outside the text!”Although Falck’s refutation of postmodernism is telling and effective, it parallels the critique offered by other critics, such as John Ellis in Against Deconstruction. The true originality of his book lies in its admirably straightforward call to take up again the project of English and German Romanticism. For [End Page 264] Falck “the essential function of the literary text is one of revelation or disclosure” (p. 90). Myth, Truth and Literature argues that literature can reveal truths otherwise inexpressible through the use of myth. The romantic revival that he calls for will, however, also be a true postmodernism, because it will share the postmodernist rejection of transcendence in favor of “the essentially Romantic, but philosophically profound, recognition of the necessarily embodied and located nature of all human experiencing” (p. 84). Considering Romanticism “the third great advent of spirituality to the Western world” (p. 140) after Hellenic paganism and Christianity, Falck looks forward to a postmodernist literature that will reaffirm the truths of paganism while avoiding the “imaginative exclusiveness” of Christianity.One may share Falck’s refusal to accept postmodernism’s Abolition of Reality and yet have serious doubts about his proposed alternative. A reconsideration of the theories of Friedrich Schlegel and Samuel Taylor Coleridge offers more hope for literary criticism than an acceptance of the dominance of postmodernism and cultural studies, but it is not clear that Falck’s version of romanticism avoids the pitfalls of the contemporary approaches he rightly criticizes.He may not attempt to abolish reality, but Falck does seem to neglect the lessons of contemporary history. He opens his book by asserting that “romanticism looks forward to Marxism, psychoanalysis, and to every significant modern attempt to persuade men to take... (shrink)
- Review of James Boyd White'sFrom Expectations to Experience. [REVIEW]James Seaton -2001 -Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 13 (1):193-201.
- The Metaphysics of Postmodernism. [REVIEW]James Seaton -1999 -Humanitas 12 (1):104.
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David Bourget (Western Ontario)
David Chalmers (ANU, NYU)
Area Editors:
David Bourget
Gwen Bradford
Berit Brogaard
Margaret Cameron
David Chalmers
James Chase
Rafael De Clercq
Ezio Di Nucci
Esa Diaz-Leon
Barry Hallen
Hans Halvorson
Jonathan Ichikawa
Monte Johnson
Michelle Kosch
Øystein Linnebo
Paul Livingston
Brandon Look
Manolo Martínez
Matthew McGrath
Michiru Nagatsu
Susana Nuccetelli
Giuseppe Primiero
Jack Alan Reynolds
Darrell P. Rowbottom
Aleksandra Samonek
Constantine Sandis
Howard Sankey
Jonathan Schaffer
Thomas Senor
Daniel Star
Jussi Suikkanen
Aness Kim Webster
Other editors
Contact us
Learn more about PhilPapers
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