Books by Fred Dallmayr

Challenges the ""desert character"" of modern culture. Political and economic corruption, incessant warmongering, spoliation of natural resources, and, above all, mindless consumerism and greedy self-satisfaction are all symptoms of what Fred Dallmayr contends is an expanding wasteland or desert where everything creative and nourishing decays and withers.

The life story of a German-American scholar deeply involved, over several decades, in evolving intellectual trends and movements and profoundly affected by successive geopolitical events and calamities.

The book denounces the irresponsible recklessness of some geopolitical agendas which are pushing the world relentlessly toward a major global war, and possibly toward nuclear destruction or apocalypse. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has recently placed the Doomsday Clock at three minutes to midnight. Signs pointing toward a possible grand disaster are multiple: everywhere one looks in our world today one finds ethnic and religious conflicts, bloody mayhem, incipient genocide, proxy wars and hybrid wars, renewal of the Cold War. Add to these ills global economic crises, massive streams of refugees, and the threats posed by global warming - and the picture of a world in complete disorder is complete. Thus, it is high time for humankind to wake up. Starting from the portrayal of global anomie, the book issues a call to people everywhere to oppose the rush to destruction and to return to political sanity and the quest for peace. This is a call to global public responsibility. In ethical terms, it says that people everywhere have an obligation to prevent apocalypse and to maintain our world or hold the world together in all its dimensions - including the dimensions of human and social life, natural ecology, and human spiritual aspirations (or openness to the divine). Differently out: in lieu of the prevailing disorder and brokenness, the book urges us to search for a new wholeness and just peace.The book is intercultural and also inter-disciplinary. Since the aim is holistic - to hold the world together - the book necessarily has to draw on many disciplines: including philosophy, theology, social science, history, and literature. In terms of Western philosophical and intellectual legacies, it draws mainly on the teachings of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida. It also offers a completely new interpretation of the work of Thomas Hobbes, unearthing in this work an ethical demand to exit from the state of perpetual warfare in the direction of a shared commonwealth. The text also relies on the teachings of Christian theology (both Catholic and Protestant), invoking at crucial junctures the works of Karl Barth, Raimon Panikkar, and others. In terms of non-Western intellectual and spiritual legacies, the book offers new interpretations of leading texts in the Indian and Chinese traditions. Thus, emphasis is placed on the ideas of world maintenance (loka-samgraha) in Hinduism and of All-Under-Heaven in classical Chinese thought. Although a central thrust of the text is for a new wholeness, the goal is not a uniform synthesis where everything would be swallowed up in a bland unity. Rather the issue is how to preserve diversity of the world in its rightful integrity, by linking all elements in a complex web of interconnections and relationality.

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, one's 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.

In an age marked by global hegemony and festering civilization clashes, this text charts a path toward a cosmopolitan democracy respectful of local differences. The main emphasis of the study is on linkages or meditation, arranged along the two axes of "local-global" and "self-other" relations.

Small Wonder presents the dangers of the "underside of modernity": the unleashing of unlimited lust for (global) power and wealth. Relying on leading critical intellectuals, Dallmayr offers a critique of the self-deceptions of our age, pleading in favor of the cultivation of the "small wonder" of everyday life.

16th-century humanist Erasmus allows ""Peace"" to speak as a plaintiff, protesting her shabby treatment at the hands of humankind and our ever-ready inclination to launch wars. Against this lure of warfare, Erasmus pits the higher task of peace-building, which can only succeed through the cultivation of justice and respect for all human life.

Globalization can be seen as a process of universal standardization under the auspices of market economics, technology and hegemonic power. Resisting this process without endorsing parochial self-enclosure, Dallmayr seeks alternative visions that are rooted in distinct vernacular traditions and facilitate cross-cultural learning in a global arena.