Thoreau's Importance for Philosophy

"A sustained encounter between Thoreau's sense of philosophy as urgent cultural work--at once ethical, metaphysical, political, aesthetic, epistemological, and religious--and the current dispensations of academic philosophy is long overdue. The learned, genial, and intense guides who here stage this encounter produce a reckoning with Thoreau and with philosophy that is not to be missed."--Richard Eldridge, Swarthmore College "For all the rich diversity of these essays about Thoreau, they are bound together by their consistent, and penetrating, attention to the specifically philosophical dimension of his thought. Thoreau is to be taken seriously as a philosopher, as Stanley Cavell, interviewed in the collection, made eloquently clear many years ago. A book with this emphasis is long overdue, and readers will find Thoreau's Importance for Philosophy challenging and illuminating."--H. Daniel Peck, author of Thoreau's Morning Work