Bøger af Charles Stein

FROM MIMIR'S HEAD comprises two reciprocal passes through the same terrain - a sequence of poems mostly exploring ontological matters in a variety of verse inventions, and a series of notes in a prose equally exploratory and inventive. In both, the quickly shifting diction is at once mercurial and immaculate, theimages vivid and well-ordered, the structures musical and truly spoken, and the thought, if philosophical, nonetheless sprung from the recognition of the limits of metaphysical discourse. Stein writes: The philosopher shouldbe discouraged in his metaphysical pretension, but the metaphysician encouraged in his poetic need.

The translation is accompanied by a series of interpretive essays by the translator. Stein maintains that the Parmenides text is an important poem as well as a philosophical treatise and translates it as such. His "Parmenides Project" comprises some thirty years of journal writings documenting an extended "thought experiment" in which he takes seriously Parmenides' assertion that Being and only Being truly "is" and that all else --all thoughts, intuitions, imaginings, sensations, perceptions, myths, philosophical opinions, by the very structure of "seeming" must "seem to Be." The author contends that this view suggests a practice of mind that corresponds to the culminating focus of many contemplative paths both East and West and is of contemporary interest because it assumes the relativism of much in present day philosophy without falling into abject nihilism.