Böcker av Clare Carlisle

A startling new portrait of George Eliot, the beloved novelist and a rare philosophical mind who explored the complexities of marriage.In her mid-thirties, Marian Evans transformed herself into George Eliot-an author celebrated for her genius as soon as she published her debut novel. During those years she also found her life partner, George Lewes-writer, philosopher, and married father of three. After "eloping" to Berlin in 1854, they lived together for twenty-four years: Eliot asked people to call her "Mrs Lewes" and dedicated each novel to her "Husband." Though they could not legally marry, she felt herself initiated into the "great experience" of marriage-"this double life, which helps me to feel and think with double strength." The relationship scandalized her contemporaries yet she grew immeasurably within it. Living at once inside and outside marriage, Eliot could experience this form of life-so familiar yet also so perplexing-from both sides. In The Marriage Question, Clare Carlisle reveals Eliot to be not only a great artist but also a brilliant philosopher who probes the tensions and complexities of a shared life. Through the immense ambition and dark marriage plots of her novels, we see Eliot wrestling-in art and in life-with themes of desire and sacrifice, motherhood and creativity, trust and disillusion, destiny and chance. Carlisle's searching new biography explores how marriage questions grow and change, and joins Eliot in her struggle to marry thought and feeling.Includes black-and-white images

Philosopher of the Heart is the groundbreaking biography of renowned existentialist Søren Kierkegaard's life and creativity, and a searching exploration of how to be a human being in the world.Søren Kierkegaard is one of the most passionate and challenging of all modern philosophers, and is often regarded as the founder of existentialism. Over about a decade in the 1840s and 1850s, writings poured from his pen pursuing the question of existence-how to be a human being in the world?-while exploring the possibilities of Christianity and confronting the failures of its institutional manifestation around him.Much of his creativity sprang from his relationship with the young woman whom he promised to marry, then left to devote himself to writing, a relationship which remained decisive for the rest of his life. He deliberately lived in the swim of human life in Copenhagen, but alone, and died exhausted in 1855 at the age of 42, bequeathing his remarkable writings to his erstwhile fiancée. Clare Carlisle's innovative and moving biography writes Kierkegaard's life as far as possible from his own perspective, to convey what it was like actually being this Socrates of Christendom-as he put it, living life forwards yet only understanding it backwards.

A bold reevaluation of Spinoza that reveals his powerful, inclusive vision of religion for the modern ageSpinoza is widely regarded as either a God-forsaking atheist or a God-intoxicated pantheist, but Clare Carlisle says that he was neither. In Spinoza's Religion, she sets out a bold interpretation of Spinoza through a lucid new reading of his masterpiece, the Ethics. Putting the question of religion centre-stage but refusing to convert Spinozism to Christianity, Carlisle reveals that "e;being in God"e; unites Spinoza's metaphysics and ethics. Spinoza's Religion unfolds a powerful, inclusive philosophical vision for the modern age-one that is grounded in a profound questioning of how to live a joyful, fully human life.Like Spinoza himself, the Ethics doesn't fit into any ready-made religious category. But Carlisle shows how it wrestles with the question of religion in strikingly original ways, responding both critically and constructively to the diverse, broadly Christian context in which Spinoza lived and worked. Philosophy itself, as Spinoza practiced it, became a spiritual endeavor that expressed his devotion to a truthful, virtuous way of life. Offering startling new insights into Spinoza's famously enigmatic ideas about eternal life and the intellectual love of God, Carlisle uncovers a Spinozist religion that integrates self-knowledge, desire, practice, and embodied ethical life to reach toward our "e;highest happiness"e;-to rest in God.Seen through Carlisle's eyes, the Ethics prompts us to rethink not only Spinoza but also religion itself.

Soren Kierkegaard was the progenitor of existentialism, as well as a major literary figure and philosopher of ethics and religion. This work offers a comprehensive account of Kierkegaard's philosophy. It also covers the literary and philosophical challenges raised by Kierkegaard's 'direct' and 'indirect' forms of communication.

Soren Kierkegaard was without question one of the most important and influential thinkers of the nineteenth century. "Fear and Trembling" is his classic text in the history that challenges readers with its original philosophical perspective and idiosyncratic literary style. This guide offers an introduction to this important work.