Preface and Acknowledgments

Which productions of art and thought are worth studying?How exactly does our engagement with transformational works influence our personal judgment in literature, art, morality, and politics?Teachers of the humanities face these questions whenever they decide what to include on their syllabi and what to study themselves.The essays collected here afford a wide range of examples to show how scholars pursue insight and wisdom by reflecting on the materials they choose for serious attention and searching criticism.The contributors form a diverse array, and they disagree about many things.They are in accord about the interest of a renewed attention to judgment and value in humanistic teaching and research.One other belief unites them: a sense of the strengthened understanding that comes from rereading or re-experiencing major works of art and thought.The authors represent three generations of scholars, in the fields of literature, philosophy, the history of art, and the history of political thought.Their essays in appreciation and analysis cover a wide range of subjects: classical and modern ethical theory, metaphysics, painting, social criticism, the novel, autobiography, and lyric poetry.The texts that elicit these responses were consulted for the distinctive addition they make to a conversation that has a deep past in humanistic study.