The book briefly and deeply describes the oeuvre of Nicholas Roerich, who is extre mely significant to the Russian and world culture but whose significance has not been yet understood in its entirety. Nicholas Roerich was a unique person: he was a great painter, original thinker, tireless traveler and researcher, a public figure of planetary scale. He had, as it is shown in the book, that specific inner synthesis, so that any domain found within his range of interests, – be it art, science, poetry, philosophy or essay writing, – was not only related to the other but was also both interpenetrating and inseparable from it.He was an outstanding historian, archeologist ant ethnographer. His position, as a historian, was based on the philosophy of a cosmic reality, a new cosmic world outlook; according to the author of the book, a great number of his artworks have prophetic nature.Among Roerichs’ historic deeds are the unique Central-Asian Expedition with its valuable results, establishment of Urusvati Institute – the prototype of a synthetic science of future, the Pact named after Roerich on the protection of cultural heritage, which had and still have a significant contribution to the evolution of humanity.A great number of color reproductions of paintings by Nicholas Roerich related to the text give to the reader an opportunity to feel the esthetic side of the problems in question.

In an attempt to subject representative texts of a dozen ancient authors to a more or less Socratic inquiry, the noted scholar George Anastaplo suggests in The Thinker as Artist how one might usefully read as well as enjoy such texts, which illustrate the thinking done by the greatest artists and how they "talk" among themselves across the centuries. In doing so, he does not presume to repeat the many fine things said about these and like authors, but rather he discusses what he himself has noticed about them, text by text. Drawing upon a series of classical authors ranging from Homer and Sappho to Plato and Aristotle, Anastaplo examines issues relating to chance, art, nature, and divinity present in the artful works of philosophers and other thinkers. As he has done in his earlier work, Anastaplo mines the great texts to help us discover who we are and what we should be. Some of the works used are familiar, while others were once better known than they are now. The approach to all of them is fresh and provocative, demonstrating the value of such texts in showing the reader what to look for and how to talk about matters that have always engaged thoughtful human beings. These imaginative yet disciplined discussions of important texts of ancient Greek thought and of Raphael's The School of Athens should appeal to both the specialist and the general reader.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

We know a great deal of what Michel de Montaigne (1533-92), Shakespeare's near-contemporary and fellow literary mastermind, thinks. We know, because he tells us on page after page of his Essais, which have marked literature and thought since the European Renaissance and remain to this day compelling reading. It might seem surprising, with this wealth of evidence at hand, that Montaigne could prove so elusive in his thinking. Yet elusive he proves, as volatile as he is voluble. What, we are left wondering, does all that thinking amount to? How is it to be understood? And what value might it have for us? Montaigne has too often seen his thinking reduced to the expression of an '-ism'. Richard Scholar investigates the nature - and detail - of Montaigne's evolving attempts to seek out that elusive thing called truth. Examining at close quarters passages from across the Essais, Scholar provides twenty-first-century readers with a companion guide to a text that is rooted in the time and place of its composition and yet continues to speak to the present, to haunt its readers, to ask them the questions that matter.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Existing art theory is obsessed by theories of spectatorship based on concepts of signification derived from language. This book shows the weakness of such a perspective, and, as an alternative, argues that individual aesthetic transformations of pictorial structure change one’s experience of space. In addition, it proves that this transformation is an ongoing process; pictorial art is progressively articulated through historical development, and is, therefore able to increase its cognitive and aesthetic scope. To support such a perspective, the book brings together ideas from Ernst Cassirer and Paul Crowther. Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms offers a profound way of understanding historical transformations in our experience of space, and Crowther’s work on imagination and aesthetics shows how this can be extended to pictorial space and the uniqueness of pictorial art. By combining the two approaches, it is demonstrated how pictorial art extends our basic involvement in, and cognition of, space, and provides it with a special kind of aesthetic meaning.