Twilight of the Idlers by John Faithful Hamer

Regular price: $0.99 CAD
Sale price: $0.99 CAD
Regular price
Unit price: per

Shipping calculated at checkout.

Quantity

Quantity must be 1 or more

This book stands in a long historical tradition—that of the philosophical epistle—and shows that that tradition still has much to offer us. Hamer does a bang-up job presenting himself: his life, his history, and his personal philosophy for coping with the particular challenges put to him by mortality. What makes the book so engaging is the way that Hamer makes it both intimately personal (his own insights into himself, really) and broadly relevant (to the reader, whose particular experiences with mortality are not Hamer's). Hamer passes judgment on himself and society without succumbing either to objective hybris (I have solved the riddle of the Sphinx and can tell you how to live your own life to best effect) or to subjective, solipsistic hybris (The meaning of life is something only I can know, a personal revelation that is incommunicable, even though I am writing a book about it—oops!). Reading this book is like having a really good conversation: by the end of it, you feel that you know something substantial not just about John Hamer, but also about yourself. Hamer comes as close as anyone I have read to making serious thoughts about 'the human condition' accessible to ordinary people (by which I mean, curious folks who may or may not be professional philosophers or academics), in ordinary language (by which I mean, language that is free from technical jargon without being heedless). Hamer's is the kind of philosophy that traditionally belongs in philosophical epistles, which are about experiencing mortality first (how am I dying? how are you dying? how are we dying together?) and only secondarily concerned with achieving anything like perfect understanding of it (what is death?). The only thing better than reading this book would be to spend a few hours talking with the author.—Joseph Gresham Miller, Lewis Department of Humanities, Illinois Institute of Technology (Chicago, Illinois)