Первопонятия. Ключи к культурному коду Эпштейн Михаил

3. The Human

The Human

Soul

Conscience

Faith

Guilt

Body

Purity

Lightness

Charm

Vulgarity

The Uncanny

4. Feeling

Feeling

Love

Desire

Jealousy

Mood

Sadness

Longing

Resentment

Surprise

Tenderness

5. Mind

Mind

Insanity

Consciousness

Thinking

Wisdom

6. Power

Power

People

Intelligentsia

Motherland

7. Creativity

Creativity

Genius

The Interesting

The Poetic

Play

Image

Word

Silence

Writing

Reading

Book

Each concept is presented as a point of departure for different cultural trends, philosophical views, and critical interpretations. Arranged in alphabetical order throughout the book, the concepts are cross-referenced at the end of each entry with related concepts (see  sign).

This book follows the pattern of such well-known anthologies of concepts as Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy (1945) and Raymond Williams’s Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976). However, this book is not intended to outline a particular theme or worldview (whether a mystical philosophy or politics of culture), but rather to frame the issue itself of concepts as instruments of intelletual creativity. What problems and riddles do they pose to our thought-process, what explosive paradoxes do they encompass, and what theories and hypotheses evolve from them?

The author is the well-known Russian-American cultural scholar, critical thinker, and linguist Mikhail N. Epstein, professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University (Atlanta, US). This book is the result of his many years of multidisciplinary work on issues of language and thought. His other books include A Constructive Dictionary of the Humanities, From Knowledge to Creativity, Poetry and Superpoetry, Postmodernism in Russia, The Phoenix of Philosophy, Ideas against Ideocracy, and a number of monographs and articles translated into twenty-four languages.