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The Shipwrecked Mind: Intellectuals in History
The Shipwrecked Mind Intellectuals in History Author:Mark Lilla A sense of nostalgia, of not feeling at home in the present, and an attempt to recover a lost philosophical or religious tradition characterize the twentieth-century intellectuals whose work Mark Lilla investigates in The Shipwrecked Mind. — From Franz Rosenzweig, who sought to lead assimilated Jews away from the world of history and politics and... more » back to the sources of Jewish tradition, to Leo Strauss, who tried to recover the Socratic tradition in philosophy, to Eric Voegelin, who wrote a multivolume universal history to explain human consciousness, to the rediscovery of Saint Paul by former Marxists, Lilla traces an intellectual craving for theological-political mythmaking, for a grand historical narrative--an "imaginative assemblage of past events and ideas and present hopes and fears"--that can locate humanity's wrong turn on the path to modernity, and help us return to philosophical or religious truth.« less