Hating perfection
Subtitle: a subtle search for the best possible world
By: John F. Williams
Edition: Rev. ed.
Publisher: Humanity Books
Published: 2013
Place of publication: Amherst, N.Y
Language: eng
Number of pages: 373
ISBN-13: 9781616148751
Subjects: Social epistemology; Life; Ontology; Conduct of life; Ethics; Philosophy
Description: The best heaven and the worst hell are the same place. Travel with author John F. Williams into the jungles of Laos and into a new understanding of existence. In lively short stories, Hating Perfection shows the everyday world as uncanny, equally strange as the imaginary worlds of Borges or Kafka. This engrossing, strikingly original book invites you to experience your life in a new way. Hating Perfection weaves its stories together with an elegant logic. Our hateful world--painful, unjust, ruthless, fatal--stands revealed as the best of all possible worlds. Flooded everywhere by a perfection both alien and addicting. What we want is different from what we get. But the reason why has a divine splendor. In this revised edition, Mr. Williams has added a postscript that addresses the well-known philosopher's paradox of the Chinese room. The author explains for the first time how we know that such a room as usually described would not have consciousness.
Table of contents: title: The handbag; title: The siren; title: Hating perfection; title: Beer at Joe's; title: The black death; title: The exaltation of growing weeds; title: Heaven and hell together; title: Rain in Wuhan; title: Red and white; title: Dry bones; title: "What then must we do?"; title: The human style of interpreting the world; title: Lightness; title: Lee Ming crosses the street; title: The waiter brings linguini; title: Ambition in the big universe; title: Opinions and spiders; title: We the addicted; title: Flattening evil; title: Fiction; title: The measure of good and evil; title: The Guanagzhou train station; title: Subtlety and physical law; title: She walks in beauty on the night; title: The necessary failure of immortality; title: Whiskey Lao; title: High class prostitute; title: Sympathy for Genghis Khan; title: The murder of Mr. Smith; title: Dialogue on death; title: Why we exist; title: The world's peculiar structure; title: Moral status; title: Harry Lime; title: The blind masseuse of Tsingtao; title: The united opinion; title: One unique best world; title: The upper limit to the value of possible worlds; title: The upper limit to the quality of subtlety; title: Dynamics at the upper limit; title: The alien presence.