Joan Stambaugh – författare

This volume explores facets of Nietzsche relatively untouched by the majority of the vast literature on him. Stambaugh concentrates on his ideas on art and creativity in general, regarding these realms of human endeavor as not limited to aesthetics in the narrower sense, but as constitutive of life itself. She also explores a much neglected side of Nietzsche's thought, a dimension that is poetic and mystical. Drawing mainly from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche's most enigmatic and profound work, Stambaugh interprets Nietzsche's ultimate affirmation of life out of his experience of eternity.

Bringing together the depth insights of eastern and western traditions, this book places the topic of the self in a new context.Gathering and interpreting material that is not readily available elsewhere, this book discusses the thought of the Japanese Buddhist philosophers Dogen, Hisamatsu, and Nishitani. Stambaugh develops ideas about the self culminating in the concept of the Formless Self as formulated by Hisamatsu in his book The Fullness of Nothingness and the essay "The Characteristics of Oriental Nothingness," and further explicated by Nishitani in his book Religion and Nothingness. These works show that Oriental nothingness has nothing to do with the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western concept of nihilism. Instead, it is a positive phenomenon, enabling things to be.

What is real? What is man? Beginning with these two fundamental questions, The Real is not the Rational searches back into the history of philosophy for the development of these issues. It presents selected key stages in the history of the rationalist tradition, indicating the direction in which rationalism sought what is real. The role of non-rationalist tendencies within rationalism and the shift to an emphasis on the irrational in the nineteenth century are also examined. The study seeks alternatives to the rational-irrational dilemma-alternatives found in Heidegger, who takes the non-rational seriously. It also looks for alternatives in Buddhism, which dissolves the dichotomy between the rational and the irrational since its prime concern was never with reason, but has always been soteriological.