Bøger af Harvey Flaumenhaft

The Federalist Papers offers an expansive vision of the American Constitution and the original sense of the federal character of the American government. What is contained in these eternally studied arguments is a complex construction of American federalism, and approaching this body of work with its full context in view is necessary but often difficult to achieve. Harvey Flaumenhaft has therefore provided readers with a unique, visual resource to be used as a companion to the primary text written centuries ago. As Flaumenhaft suggests, use of The Federalist is only truly of service when students see the full picture; ripping a few lines from it to make one's own point is not representative of the "elaborately structured whole." He has drawn up a kind of unpacked proof for the arguments made in The Federalist, and seeks to help readers "see the structure in that sequence if they examine a depiction in which the copious items are spatially arranged to show their complex relations of subordination, coordination, and dependence. [...] The reader with this visual aid can better discern how the clear but elaborate structure fits together." Flaumenhaft includes two further documents after giving them the same treatment--namely, the table of claims of authorship of papers in The Federalist, and the Articles of Confederation. The latter is important as it is precisely this document that the Constitutions of the United States was meant to replace. This is an important guide to early American history studies, American government, and political thought taken more broadly. Flaumenhaft's interdisciplinary use of geometric dissection is a daring and unorthodox invitation to see The Federalist like never before. The visual rendering of this dense and critically important collection of papers is furthermore a key tool in bringing younger students to a deeper appreciation of its purpose and accomplishment.

The past becomes a source of wisdom when the scientific quest for uncovering the roots of things is combined with the humanistic endeavor to make the dead letter come alive in a thoughtful mind. Vague attempts at being "interdisciplinary," by contrast, merely provide excuses to avoid examining the words set down by the scientific thinkers themselves. If we love wisdom in its wholeness, we must explore the sources of the things that we now take for granted: we must think through the records of the thinking that has demarcated the various fields of study and envisioned what's to be investigated within them and how it's to be done. But where shall we start looking for points of view to help us consider what learning is, and what learning has to do with how we live within our world? We couldn't do better than to climb the two peaks that constitute the subject of this book. these are the classical geometry in which Apollonius presented the conic sections, and that modern transformation over which Descartes presided at its inception. In this effort, a useful link between our two primary texts is provided by examining some work done by Diophantus, by Pappus, and by Viète. While the study of these writings is a formidable enterprise indeed, the two volumes of Insights and Manipulations, offering clear guidance and abundant help, greatly alleviate the requisite labor.