Argues that the ability to imagine oneself as another person is an indispensable human capacity - as essential to moral awareness as it is to literary appreciation - and that this talent for identification is the same as the talent for metaphor. This title offers an original meditation on the necessity of imagination to moral and aesthetic life.
Ted Cohen was an original and captivating essayist known for his inquisitive intelligence, wit, charm, and a deeply humane feel for life. For Cohen, writing was a way of discovering, and also celebrating, the depth and complexity of things overlooked by most professional philosophers and aestheticians—but not by most people. Whether writing about the rules of baseball, of driving, or of Kant’s Third Critique; about Hitchcock, ceramics, or jokes, Cohen proved that if you study the world with a bemused but honest attentiveness, you can find something to philosophize about more or less anywhere. This collection, edited and introduced by philosopher Daniel Herwitz, brings together some of Cohen’s best work to capture the unique style that made Cohen one of the most beloved philosophers of his generation. Among the perceptive, engaging, and laugh-out-loud funny reflections on movies, sports, art, language, and life included here are Cohen’s classic papers on metaphor and his Pushcart Prize–winning essay on baseball, as well as memoir, fiction, and even poetry. Full of free-spirited inventiveness, these Serious Larks would be equally at home outside Thoreau’s cabin on the waters of Walden Pond as they are here, proving that intelligence, sensitivity, and good humor can be found in philosophical writing after all.
As a philosopher, Ted Cohen is interested in how jokes work, why they work and when they don't. He considers questions of audience, selection of joke topics, the ethnic character of jokes and their morality, all with of examples that should make the reader either chuckle or wince.
Dubya still likes to call himself "The Decider." But a lot was decided for him. This imaginative memoir reveals the real George W. Bush from his youth, written by the Maine reporter who "busted" W for drunk driving.