Community, Violence, and Peace: Aldo Leopold, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Gautama the Buddha in the Twenty-First Century / Edition 1

by A. L. Herman

Overview

Community, Violence, and Peace explores the concept of community and the belief that it can resolve the dilemmas of excessive violence and insufficient peace in the twenty-first century. Herman begins by analyzing two fictional communities, the spiritual community of Plato and the materialist community of Aldous Huxley. He then investigates four historical communities, the biotic community of Aldo Leopold, the ashramic community of Mohandas K. Gandhi, the beloved community of Martin Luther King Jr., and the karmic community of Gautama the Buddha. All six communities call for and profess to lead to the reduction of violence and the increase in peace. After an extensive exploration of the characteristics of these communities and the quandaries that each generates and that renders them objectionable, Herman argues that substituting communal egoism for communal altruism will settle the predicament of violence and peace in the twenty-first century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780791439845
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	10/15/1998
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

A. L. Herman is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point. He is the author of several works, including The Problem of Evil and Indian Thought, Second Edition.

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

1. Something about Community

2. Aldo Leopold and the Biotic Community

3. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and the Ashramic Community

4. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Beloved Community

5. Gautama the Buddha and the Karmic Community

6. Conclusion: Community and the Twenty-First Century

Notes

Some Suggestions for Further Reading

Index

Editorial Reviews

"Community, Violence, and Peace takes up key questions facing the world today and engages them from the best of Western and Eastern wisdom. How to create community in the face of individualism on the one hand and group violence on the other (especially when nature is included in the consideration) is perhaps the most serious problem facing humanity today." — Harold Coward, University of Victoria, author of Jung and Eastern Thought

"Herman's book is a pure delight. It is cross-cultural philosophy at its best: humane, wide-ranging, at times very witty—altogether a 'must' for all in the fields of comparative philosophy and social ethics." — Frank J. Hoffman, West Chester University

From the Publisher

Explores the views of a number of utopian thinkers in their effort to base peace upon a philosophy of communal altruism. Arguing that communal altruism reveals itself in the discussion as "logically opaque and empirically and practically incoherent," the authors attempt to replace to with a reformulation labeled communal egoism. They contend that all of the thinkers examined would accept their reformulation. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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