COMING MAY 2025
Edited by Dustin Peone
The essays in this volume bring forth perspectives on the concept of philosophy, the history of philosophy, and the nature of humane education advanced by Donald Phillip Verene in his teaching and his writings. The essays are by former students. Verene approaches philosophy through Giambattista Vico’s New Science concerning the Common Nature of the Nations, G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. From Vico he takes the principle of “imaginative universals,” from Hegel the principle of the “speculative sentence,” from Cassirer the principle of “symbolic form,” and from Joyce the principle of “two thinks at a time.”
Verene sees philosophy as a kind of literature. Philosophy, like poetry, exists through words. Speculative philosophy is a way of thinking that is to be placed above critical philosophy. Speculative philosophy leads to taking up philosophy as a way of life that involves the pursuit of the interconnection of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. This pursuit stands against the dominance of technology over the transcendent sense of the really real, of the forms of consciousness that lead to “absolute knowledge” and to the sense of the True as the whole.
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About the Author
Donald Phillip Verene is Charles Howard Candler Professor Emeritus of Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy at Emory University. He held visiting appointments at Oxford University, University of Toronto, University of Rome “La Sapienza,” and the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C. His many works have been widely translated. He is Fellow of the Italian national academy, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (Rome).
Dustin Peone is Instructor of Liberal Studies at Mercer University. His books include Memory as Philosophy, Shame, Fame, and the Technological Mentality, and Making Philosophy Laugh.
Table of Contents
Introduction (Timothy Harfield)
1. The Art of the Moral and Metaphysical Education of the Humane Doctor (Raymond Barfield)
2. Symbolic Form (Thora Ilin Bayer)
3. Wisdom Speaking: The Art of Humane Education (Travis Foster)
4. Jacques Ellul and the Problem of Making in the World of Technique (David Lovekin)
5. Verene’s Recollection (Glenn Alexander Magee)
6. Vico and the Hebrews (Frederick R. Marcus)
7. Vico’s Platonic Paideia (Nancy du Bois Marcus)
8. Allegory and the Speculative Impulse in Philosophy (Jennifer Lobo Meeks)
9. Melancholy, Memory, and Circling the Square (Jennifer Rust Murray)
10. Dialectics and the Art of Humor (Dustin Peone)
11. The Fine Art of Digestion (Scott Samuelson)
12. Virtue and the Real in the Myths of Plato’s Republic (Charlotte C. S. Thomas)
Afterword (Donald Phillip Verene)