"In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is", said Gertude Stein. From the Midway area of Minneapolis to the prairie grasslands of Kansas, the American landscape is characterized by this spaciousness--and by the presence of windowless, rumbling, enormous grain elevators, rising above the steeples of churches to announce the presence of a town and to explain, in great measure, the function of its inhabitants. Why did their builders choose that particular form to fulfill a practical necessity? And how does the experience of great emptiness shape what people think, feel, and do? Frank Gohlke, one of America's foremost photographers of landscape, has pondered and documented the relationship between these enormous structures and the emptiness of the surrounding landscape for the past two decades. The result is this evocative sequence of images, beginning with Gohlke's earliest formal studies of structural fragments and their mechanisms, and gradually expanding to depict the grain elevator as a part of the landscape. His camera eventually retreats so far that the grain elevator disappears in the horizon, and only the landscape--the "space where nobody is"--is visible. Introducing the photographs is a personal essay by Gohlke on the relationship between people and their space, and the ways in which that relationship actually creates a landscape. A concluding historical essay by John C. Hudson details the development and function of the grain elevator and its geographical and economic role in American life.

Measure of Emptiness is a meditation on the vast spaces of the Great Plains, the heartland of American agricultural productivity, and the centrality of the grain elevator to its social, cultural and symbolic life. In photographs made between 1972 and 1977 with the support of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment of Art, Frank Gohlke traveled back and forth through the central tier of states from his home in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to the Texas Panhandle, seeking an answer to the puzzle of the grain elevators' extraordinary power as architecture in a landscape whose primary dramas were in the sky. br> "In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is," said Gertrude Stein. The Great Plains are characterized by this spaciousness, and by the presence of windowless, rumbling, enormous grain elevators, rising above the steeples of churches to announce the presence of the town and to explain, in great measure, the lives and livelihoods of its inhabitants. Why did their builders choose that particular form to fulfi ll and practical necessity? And does the experience of great emptiness shape what people think, feel and do?

This book is an annotated translation of one of the great Tibetan classics of Mahayana Buddhist thought, mKhas grub rje's sTong thun chen mo. The text is a detailed critical exposition of the theory and practice of emptiness as expounded in the three major schools of Mahayana Buddhist philosophy: the Yogacara, Svatantrika, and Prasangika. Used as a supplement to the scholastic debating manuals in some of the greatest monasteries of Tibet, the sTong thun chen mo is a veritable encyclopedia of Mahayana Buddhist philosophy, dealing with such topics as hermeneutics, the theory of non-duality, the linguistic interpretation of emptiness, the typology of ignorance, logic, the nature of time, and the perception of matter across world spheres. This book is an indispensable source for understanding the Tibetan dGe lugs pa school's synthesis of the Middle Way (Madhyamaka) and Epistemological (Pramanika) traditions of Indian Buddhism. In addition, it is an unprecedented source for the philosophical polemics of fifteenth century Tibet.

In this book Gay Watson offers an alternative view of emptiness via a tour of early and non-Western philosophy, taking us from Buddhism, Taoism and religious mysticism to the contemporary world of philosophy, science and art practice.

The question of unintelligibility does not arise with regard to books of fiction, such as the stories and novels, irrespective of how they are written. Even if a story is not understood, there is no great harm done. The problem is with the theoretical essays. Even there, there is no problem with the essays related to the natural science, if the language is simple. The real problem is with the books of philosophy! When we find the word ‘philosophy’ on the face of the book, we feel that ‘this book is meant for the scholars, not for us,’ The very word ‘philosophy’ at the outset will scare us immensely. When we read the word ‘philosophy’ on the face of a book, it does not mean that it represents ‘a great truth’ or ‘a great science.' The contents of the book could be correct or useless or a blend of both. The logic of the book will be in accordance with the philosophy of the book. A correct one will have a correct logic, a wrong one will have a wrong logic, and a vacillating one will have a vacillating logic.