Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme
"Few in the humanities can rival Jay's omnivorousness or match his intellectual energy." - Terry Eagleton, London Review of Books "Songs of Experience is at once modest and extraordinarily ambitious. The erudition on display in this sweeping account of a central concept in Western philosophy over several hundred years is a wonder; the writing is clear, and the scholarship breathtaking. But it is modest in the sense that it does not announce its own point of view with any emphasis. Instead, the reader benefits from the author's openness to thinkers as unalike as Schleiermacher and Rorty, Oakeshott and Bataille. Jay makes sense of each thinker on his own terms - and that's because with his intellectual openness and his conceptual mediation, Jay indeed practices what he is so lightly preaching. An intellectual historian at the top of his game, he has shared his own experience of these ideas, texts, and writers. After reading this book, we can too." - Michael Roth, Bookforum "A magisterial study of one of the most elusive, contested, and pervasively important concepts of the Western philosophical tradition." - Richard Shusterman, author of Pragmatist Aesthetics"