Denise Riley is renowned as a feminist theorist and a poet and for her remarkable refiguring of familiar but intransigent problems of identity, expression, language, and politics. In Impersonal Passion, she turns to everyday complex emotional and philosophical problems of speaking and listening. Her provocative meditations suggest that while the emotional power of language is impersonal, this impersonality paradoxically constitutes the personal. In nine linked essays, Riley deftly unravels the rhetoric of life’s absurdities and urgencies, its comforts and embarrassments, to insist on the forcible affect of language itself. She teases out the emotional complexities of such quotidian matters as what she ironically terms the right to be lonely in the face of the imperative to be social or the guilt associated with feeling as if you’re lying when you aren’t. Impersonal Passion reinvents questions from linguistics, the philosophy of language, and cultural theory in an illuminating new idiom: the compelling emotion of the language of the everyday.

J. Glenn Gray entered the army in May 1941, having been drafted on the same day he achieved his doctorate in philosophy from Columbia University. Over a decade after his discharge in 1945, Gray began to reread his war journals and letters in an attempt to find meaning in his wartime experiences. The result is a philosophical meditation on what warfare does to us and why soldiers act as they do.

A powerful critique of the revolutionary mentality and sexual aggression represented in the works of authors including D. H. Lawrence, Georges Bataille, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer.

The author of " The Creed of Buddha " can safely say that no better exposition of Buddhism has ever been given to the world. It is sympathetic, it is scholarly, and it is complete. Between east and west, says the author, a gulf has been fixed, a gulf created by basic ideas, hollowed out by the erosive action of speculative thought. The Western mind takes for granted the reality of outward things. The Eastern mind attributes the only reality to the soul. All else is maya, illusion. And there are very few that can bridge thatgulf.In the East, where the soul is the supreme and fundamental reality, the identification of God with the world-soul, or soul of universal Mature, is the outcome of a movement of thought which is at once natural and logical. This divine soul is the only real existence: by comparison with it all outward things are shadows, and all inward things, so far as they hold aloof from the all-embracing consciousness, are dreams. The worship of the supernatural, such as is to be found in Christianity, often ends in the despiritualization of Nature. which becomes merely the world without and therefore opposed to the Supernatural, which becomes the dwelling place of God .