Background
Singer, Irving was born on December 24, 1925 in New York City. Son of Isidore and Nettie (Stromer) Singer.
( What is meaning in life? Does anything really matter? H...)
What is meaning in life? Does anything really matter? How can a life achieve lasting significance? How can we explain the human propensity to struggle for ideals? How is meaning related to contentment, happiness, joy? Is meaning something we discover, or do we create it? What is the nature of value, and what are its sources in human experience? Can there be a meaning in life without religious faith? What is the meaning of death? Is life worth living? What would enable us to have a love of life? "Meaning in life," writes philosopher Irving Singer, "and the meaning in our own lives, results from creative efforts on our part. It is not a prior reality awaiting our discovery. Though we talk about a 'search' for meaning, what we are seeking is primarily a mode of creativity that will make our lives meaningful." In The Creation of Value, the first volume of his Meaning in Life trilogy, Singer studies the nature of imagination, idealization, and love in the context of humanity's attempt to define itself through the pursuit of meanings and values that it creates. Singer confronts life's most troubling problems: the meaning of death, the presence of anxiety in daily existence, the conditions needed for us to have a life worth living, and the possibility of a love of life in others as well as in ourselves.
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(Since the late 1960s film theory has been dominated by "g...)
Since the late 1960s film theory has been dominated by "grand theories" that examine motion pictures from a psychoanalytic, semiotic, or Marxist point of view. Irving Singer offers an approach to the philosophy of film by returning to the classical debate between realist and formalists - he shows how the opposing positions may be harmonized and united. He accepts the realist claim that films somehow "capture" reality, but agrees with the formalist belief that they transform it. Extending his earlier work on meaning in art and life, he suggests that the meaningfulness of movies derives from techniques that re-create reality in the process of presenting it to viewers who have learned to appreciate the aesthetics of cinematic transformation. Singer concentrates on questions about appearance and reality, the visual and the literary, and the interplay between communication as a goal and alienation as a hazard in films of every sort. In three chapters he provides suggestive reading of Woody Allen's "The Purple Rose of Cairo", Luchino Visconti's "Death in Venice", and Jean Renoir's "The Rules of the Game". The book should be of interest to the general reader as well as students in all fields related to film studies.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262194031/?tag=2022091-20
( In his widely acclaimed trilogy The Nature of Love, Irv...)
In his widely acclaimed trilogy The Nature of Love, Irving Singer traced the development of the concept of love in history and literature from the Greeks to the twentieth century. In this second volume of his Meaning in Life trilogy, Singer returns to the subject of his earlier work, exploring a different approach. Without denying his previous emphasis on the role of imagination and creativity, in this book Singer investigates the ability of them both to make one's life meaningful. A "systematic mapping" of the various facets of love (including sexual love, love in society, and religious love), The Pursuit of Love is an extended essay that offers Singer's own philosophical and psychological theory of love. Rich in insight into literature, the history of ideas, and the complexities of our being, The Pursuit of Love is a thought-provoking inquiry into fundamental aspects of all human relationships.
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( This final book in Irving Singer's Meaning in Life tril...)
This final book in Irving Singer's Meaning in Life trilogy studies the interaction between nature and the values that define human spirituality. It examines the ways in which we overcome the suffering in life by resolving our sense of being divided between them. Singer suggests that the accord between nature and spirit arises from an art of life that affords meaning, happiness, and love by employing the same principles as those that exist in all artistic achievements. It is through the meaningfulness created by imagination and idealization, Singer says, that we make life worth living. This human art form, Singer writes, enables us to unite our selfish interests with our compassionate and loving inclinations. We thereby effect a vital harmonization within which the naturalistic values of ethics, aesthetics, and religion can find their legitimate place. The good life, as envisioned by Singer, includes the love of persons, things, and ideals so intricately intermeshed that the meaning in one contributes to the meaningfulness of the other two. The result is a kind of happiness that we all desire.
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(George Santayana wrote not only important works of philos...)
George Santayana wrote not only important works of philosophy but also a novel, poetry and much literary criticism. In this portrait of Santayana's thought and complex personality, Irvine Singer explores the full range of his harmonisation of the literary and the philosophical.
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( "In this concluding volume of his impressive study of t...)
"In this concluding volume of his impressive study of the history of Western thought about the nature of love, Irving Singer reviews the principal efforts that have been made by 20th-Century thinkers to analyze the phenomenon of love. . . . The bulk of the book is taken up with critical accounts of the modern thinkers who have systematically called into question the possibility itself of love as a union of distinct human selves. For the most part, these critiques are effectively executed, and they bring a high level of critical acumen to bear on skeptical theses about love that are now too often accepted as truisms."--Frederick A. Olafson, Los Angeles Times Book Review "Irving Singer . . . has developed a method of historical analysis flexible enough to deal with all kinds of love, from Greek homosexual love in Plato, to the philia and agape of the New Testament, to the courtly love of medieval romance, to the Romantics, for whom love was magic. . . . This final volume brings us to the present. In 'The Modern World,' Singer offers readings of Freud, Proust, and Sartre, among others. He shows how their work was formed in reaction to the 19th-century ideal of 'merging' of the identities of lover and beloved. More often than not, the great modern writers portray love as impossible, as a field of failure and regret. . . . This masterpiece of critical thinking is a timely, eloquent, and scrupulous account of what, after all, still makes the world go round."--Thomas D'Evelyn, Christian Science Monitor "This is the third of a three-volume history of the philosophy of love. It begins with Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche in the nineteenth century and treats Freud, Proust, Bergson, D. H. Lawrence, G. B. Shaw, Santayana, Sartre, and others in the twentieth. Although the author's approach is primarily historical, he intersperses critical remarks throughout. Most of the major themes which are discussed by philosophers of love make their way into this history, including friendship, sexual love, and the distinction between love that is based on the value of the beloved and love that bestows value on the beloved. Singer devotes a number of pages to his own views on falling in love, being in love, and staying in love. . . . Singer's exposition is lucid and organized; his criticisms are insightful."--Ethics "In this third volume of historical overview of the development of the Western conception of love, Singer uses writers, philosophers, and psychologists to provide the reader with an overview of love in the late 19th and 20th century. . . . Analyzing authors such as Tolstoy, Proust, D. H. Lawrence, and Shaw and philosophers such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Santayana, as well as Freud, Singer . . . links each contributor's thoughts to the influence of previous writers and also provides some psycho-historical insight into their personal lives that might have been either a source or direct result of their views. In this final volume, Singer proceeds to look at not just the 'great men' influence but also provides a chapter overviewing scientific contributions to our understanding of love. . . . Singer's work is a significant contribution to understanding the social construction of important, abstract social and personal values. By tracing love through different historical periods through a variety of voices, Singer has created a rich history of the struggle between the ideal and the real, between the dreams of what love should provide and the reality of what relationships have been in each historical period. By personalizing the voice through psychohistorical analysis, Singer also provides insight into the shaping of ideas through the intimate struggles of the shapers."--Mark V. Chaffee, Contemporary Psychology
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(In this book Irving Singer tries to show how we create ou...)
In this book Irving Singer tries to show how we create our world, in part, through what we call our "feelings." That catch-all word covers a large variety of attitudes, dispositions, sentiments, emotions, intuitions, inclinations, and kinesthetic sensations. He offers a view of the affective dimension in our being which supplements, but does not duplicate, scientific inquiry. Feeling always exists in some interaction with cognitive structures. It cannot be wholly separated from them. Yet it typically lends itself to an approach that is more characteristic of the humanities than of the sciences. Singer has previously made forays into the realm of affect in his writings on love, sex, compassion, and conditions such as friendship and a religious or cosmic sense of oneness. In this book he cuts across the gamut of human feeling, inspecting it more fully though sometimes with concepts that he broached in those earlier stages of development. By portraying how feeling relies upon imagination, and through imagination upon idealization, consummation, and the aesthetic, Singer attempts to draw a family picture that will present the basic lineaments of sex, love, and compassion as well as the other stations of the spectrum to which they belong. The introductory chapter places the succeeding ones in a context of ideas about feeling in general and, more specifically, attachment of the sort that some psychologists have been investigating for the last forty years. The final chapter considers how affective failures and imperfect attachments can play a constructive rolein the growth of imagination, idealization, consummation, and the aesthetic - each of which reveals the vibrancy of our existence. In their complexity they give meaning to life and make it worth living.
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(With a new preface by the author Irving Singer's trilogy ...)
With a new preface by the author Irving Singer's trilogy The Nature of Love has been called "majestic" (New York Times Book Review), "monumental" (Boston Globe), "one of the major works of philosophy in our century" (Nous), "wise and magisterial" (Times Literary Supplement), and a "masterpiece of critical thinking that is a timely, eloquent, and scrupulous account of what, after all, still makes the world go round" (Christian Science Monitor). In the third volume, Singer examines the pervasive dialectic between optimistic idealism and pessimistic realism in modern thinking about the nature of love. He begins by discussing "anti-Romantic Romantics" (focusing on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Tolstoy), influential nineteenth-century thinkers whose views illustrate much of the ambiguity and self-contradiction that permeate thinking about love in the last hundred years. He offers detailed studies of Freud, Proust, Shaw, D. H. Lawrence, and Santayana, and he maps the ideas about love in Continental existentialism, particularly those of Sartre and de Beauvoir. Singer finally envisages a future of cooperation between pluralistic humanists and empirical scientists. This last volume of Singer's trilogy does not pretend to offer the final word on the subject, any more than do most of the philosophers he discusses, but his masterful work can take its place beside their earlier investigations into these vast and complex questions. Irving Singer Library
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( In Reality Transformed Irving Singer offers a new appro...)
In Reality Transformed Irving Singer offers a new approach to the philosophy of film. Returning to the classical debate between realists and formalists, he shows how the opposing positions may be harmonized and united. Singer concentrates on questions about appearance and reality, the visual and the literary, and the interplay between communication as a goal and alienation as a hazard in films of every sort. In three exemplary chapters, he provides suggestive readings of Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo, Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice, and Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game. Reality Transformed will interest the general reader as well as students in all fields related to film studies.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262692481/?tag=2022091-20
("With a new preface by the author"Irving Singer's trilogy...)
"With a new preface by the author"Irving Singer's trilogy "The Nature of Love" has been called "majestic" ("New York Times Book Review"), "monumental" ("Boston Globe"), "one of the major works of philosophy in our century" ("Nous"), "wise and magisterial" ("Times Literary Supplement"), and a "masterpiece of critical thinking that is a timely, eloquent, and scrupulous account of what, after all, still makes the world go round" ("Christian Science Monitor"). In the first volume, Singer begins by studying love as appraisal and bestowal as well as imagination and idealization. He then examines the contrasting views of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Ovid, Lucretius, Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Martin Luther. After having described the nature of erotic idealization, Singer analyzes the religious idealization in Judeo-Christian concepts of eros, philia, nomos, and agapē. Medieval Catholicism sought to combine these four ideas of love in the "caritas synthesis." Luther repudiated that attempt on the grounds that love exists only in God's agapastic bestowal of unlimited goodness upon humanity and all of nature. In relation to the different modes of theorizing, Singer explores the humanistic implications of each."Irving Singer Library"
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(Beginning with a discussion of Kant, Schopenhauer, and ot...)
Beginning with a discussion of Kant, Schopenhauer, and others about the morality of sex and the morality of compassion, Explorations in Love and Sex offers a panoramic view of the philosophy of love from its beginnings in Plato up to the present. It examines the nature and limitations of sexual pluralism, and elaborates on Irving Singer's earlier ideas about appraisal and bestowal as well as various other distinctions he makes. The book's chapters are both philosophical and historical, and addressed to the average person who wants to understand the curious set of emotions called love.
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( Although Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, and Jean Renoi...)
Although Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, and Jean Renoir do not pontificate about "eternal verities or analytical niceties," as Irving Singer remarks in Three Philosophical Filmmakers, each expresses, through his work, his particular vision of reality. In this study of these great directors, Singer examines the ways in which meaning and technique interact within their different visions.Singer's account reveals Hitchcock, Welles, and Renoir to be not only consummate artists and inspired craftsmen but also sophisticated theorists of film and its place in human experience. They left behind numerous essays, articles, and interviews in which they discuss the nature of their own work as well as more extensive issues. Singer draws on their writings, as well as their movies, to show the pervasive importance of what they did as dedicated filmmakers.Hitchcock used his mastery of contrived devices not as mere formalism divorced from content, Singer notes, but in order to evoke emotional responses that are meaningful in themselves and that matter greatly to millions of people. Singer's discussion of Hitchcock's work analyzes, among other things, his ideas about suspense, romance, and the comic. Singer also makes a detailed comparison of the original Psycho with Gus Van Sant's recent remake. Considering the work of Welles, Singer shows how and why the theme of vanished origins -- "the myth of the past" -- recurs in many of his films, starting with the Rosebud motif in Citizen Kane and continuing much later in his little-known masterpiece The Immortal Story. Expanding upon Renoir's comment that his own films were "always the same film," Singer studies his entire work as a coherent though evolving search for contact and "conversation" with the audience. While recognizing the primacy of technique, Renoir used cinematic artifice in the service of that humanistic aspiration.
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(This book explores elemental principles in the study of s...)
This book explores elemental principles in the study of sex while addressing readers who are not trained philosophers as well as those who are. Singer locates sex within a spectrum that also includes love and compassion. He claims that fundamental mistakes have persistently occurred because numerous theorists relegate sex, love, and compassion to separate and distinct compartments. His emphasis upon the internal linkage between sexuality and the varieties of love is further elaborated in later portions of the book: in relation to a distinction that Singer makes between 'the sensuous' and 'the passionate,' followed by consecutive ideas about the nature and valuation of sex. Discussing sex as both an appetite and an interpersonal drive, Singer argues that much philosophical confusion has resulted from the doctrines of those who constrain sexuality within either of these to the detriment of the other. What is sexual for human beings is normally, and perhaps always in some degree, a composite of the appetitive and the interpersonal. In us sex is generically a function of each. This conception of appetitive and interpersonal strands as unified in our sexuality then becomes the basis for his remarks about the relative value of individual sex acts as well as their place within the aesthetic and moral dimension of human nature.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0742512363/?tag=2022091-20
("With a new preface by the author"Irving Singer's trilogy...)
"With a new preface by the author"Irving Singer's trilogy "The Nature of Love" has been called "majestic" ("New York Times Book Review"), "monumental" ("Boston Globe"), "one of the major works of philosophy in our century" ("Nous"), "wise and magisterial" ("Times Literary Supplement"), and a "masterpiece of critical thinking that is a timely, eloquent, and scrupulous account of what, after all, still makes the world go round" ("Christian Science Monitor"). In the second volume, Singer studies the ideas and ideals of medieval courtly love and nineteenth-century Romantic love, as well as the transition between these two perspectives. According to the traditions of courtly love in the twelfth century and thereafter, not only God but also human beings in themselves are capable of authentic love. The pursuit of love between man and woman was seen as a splendid ideal that ennobles both the lover and the beloved. It was something more than libidinal sexuality and involved sophisticated and highly refined courtliness that emulated religious love in its ability to create a holy union between the participants. Adherents to Romantic love in later centuries, affirmed the capacity of love to effect a merging between two people who thus became one. Singer analyzes the transition from courtly to Romantic by reference to the writings of many artists beginning with Dante and ending with Richard Wagner, as well as Neoplatonist philosophers of the Italian Renaissance, Descartes, Spinoza, Rousseau, Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer. In relation to romanticism itself, he distinguishes between two aspects--"benign romanticism" and "Romantic pessimism"--that took on renewed importance in the twentieth century."Irving Singer Library"
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262512734/?tag=2022091-20
( "Meaning in life,"writes philosopher Irving Singer, "an...)
"Meaning in life,"writes philosopher Irving Singer, "and the meaning in our own lives, result from creative efforts on our part. It is not a prior reality awaiting our discovery. Though we talk about a 'search' for meaning, what we are seeking is primarily a mode of creativity that will make our lives meaningful." In clear, concise and direct language, Singer delves into the questions that beset most people throughout their lives, questions that often stir painful confusion and distress, and sometimes cause agonies of doubt and despair. Singer's patient consideration of the role of creativity in human experience leads him to distinguish between happiness and meaningfulness, and to offer challenging ideas about what would constitute a life that is "significant," important in itself and in its consequences. Even if values pass on through generations, he claims, they must be created anew by each individual. In The Creation of Value, the first volume of his trilogy on the good life, Singer studies the nature of imagination, idealization, and love in the context of humanity's attempt to define itself through the pursuit of meanings and values that it creates. Singer confronts life's most troubling problems: the meaning of death, the place of anxiety in daily existence, the conditions needed for us to have a life worth living, and the possibility of a love of life in others as well as in ourselves.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0801854512/?tag=2022091-20
Singer, Irving was born on December 24, 1925 in New York City. Son of Isidore and Nettie (Stromer) Singer.
AB summa cum laude, Harvard University, 1948; Master of Arts, Harvard University, 1949; Doctor of Philosophy, Harvard University, 1952.
Instructor philosophy, Cornell Univercity, 1953-1956; assistant professor, University of Michigan, 1956-1959; visiting lecturer, Johns Hopkins University, 1957-1958; member of faculty, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, since 1958; professor philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, since 1969.
( What is meaning in life? Does anything really matter? H...)
("With a new preface by the author"Irving Singer's trilogy...)
("With a new preface by the author"Irving Singer's trilogy...)
(With a new preface by the author Irving Singer's trilogy ...)
( Although Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, and Jean Renoi...)
(Beginning with a discussion of Kant, Schopenhauer, and ot...)
( "In this concluding volume of his impressive study of t...)
( In his widely acclaimed trilogy The Nature of Love, Irv...)
(Since the late 1960s film theory has been dominated by "g...)
(This final volume of Singer's trilogy discusses ideas abo...)
( This final book in Irving Singer's Meaning in Life tril...)
(This book explores elemental principles in the study of s...)
( "Meaning in life,"writes philosopher Irving Singer, "an...)
(George Santayana wrote not only important works of philos...)
(In this book Irving Singer tries to show how we create ou...)
( Music, language, and drama come together in opera to ma...)
( In Reality Transformed Irving Singer offers a new appro...)
(Sexual Studies, Social Studies)
Served with Army of the United States, 1944-1946. Member American Philosophical Association, American Society Aesthetics.
Married Josephine Fisk, June 10, 1949. Children– Anne, Margaret, Emily, Benjamin.