Offers a critique of rationalism in contemporary American thought by recovering a lost tradition of intimacy in the writings of Thoreau, Bugbee, James, Arendt, Dickinson, Fuller, Wilshire and Cavell. This title focuses on a number of American philosophers whose work overlaps the religious and the literary.

"I have read this extraordinary book carefully and find it ground-breaking. It manages to link imaginatively and sensitively a series of figures from Thoreau through Henry James and Bruce Wilshire, to Stanley Cavell, Hannah Arendt, and J. Glenn Gray. It assembles these diverse thinkers in an intense dialogue that touches base deeply with phenomenological and existential themes. At the same time, it offers an original model of 'personal philosophy' that is as timely as it is unusual at this historical moment. Throughout, there is the splendid expression of a mind that is at once sophisticated and concrete-that speaks to us in the present." -- Edward Casey, Distinguished Professor, Philosophy Department, State University of New York at Stony Brook, USA, President of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, 2009-10, and founding member of the Society of Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy