Mindfulness and Letting Be: On Engaged Thinking and Acting

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Mindfulness and Letting Be: On Engaged Thinking and Acting is a protest against the extreme mindlessness or thoughtlessness of our age, a malaise covered by manipulative cleverness and by minds filled to the brim with opinions, doctrines, marching orders, and ideologies. Rather than concentrating on a self-contained "mind," Fred Dallmayr pleads for an act of "minding" about oneself, ones fellow beings, society, and the world. What is required for such mindfulness is not a predatory reason, but a kind of reticence or "mind-fasting" as preparation for a genuine attentiveness able to "let be" without aloofness or indifference. Dallmayr explores the benefits of such mindfulness in the fields of philosophy or theory, practical conduct, language use, art works, historical understanding, and cosmopolitanism, and the insights that arise will be of benefit to students and scholars of continental, social, and political philosophy.

Reviews

Fred Dallmayr has written another a remarkable book. Learned and scholarly, it is also clear and unpretentious in its language. Sweeping in its cultural concerns and references, it is also focused upon the most basic and simple enigmas of life. Throughout, Dallmayr reminds us of the real challenges of a life that is engaged and full of thought. -- Dennis J. Schmidt, Pennsylvania State University
Mindfulness and Letting Be contains fresh and inspiring words of wisdom from a well-known, distinguished master of Heideggers thought. Fred Dallmayr's outlook is at the same time genuinely global, in the best sense of that word, and suffused with concern about humanitys future. -- William L. McBride, Purdue University
Mindfulness and Letting Be: on Engaged Thinking and Acting brings us further along the arc of Dallmayrs post-individualist political theory. Critical of contemporary pop culture understandings of mindfulness, Dallmayr instead rethinks the concept as an active letting be. He provides a provocative and thoughtful cross-cultural argument for the resources, both theoretically and practically, mindfulness provides for a response to global dehumanization. -- Peg Birmingham, Professor of Philosophy, DePaul University
Dallmayrs prose is readable and clear. Though Heideggers influence is felt throughout the text, Dallmayrs explanations make it deeply relevant and compelling. Through the author's inspiring description of an active "letting be," readers will gain insight into a way out of the mindlessness of contemporary society. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through researchers/faculty. * CHOICE *

Author Bio

Fred Dallmayr is Packey J. Dee Professor Emeritus in the departments of Philosophy and Political Science at the University of Notre Dame.