Emerson and Other Minds: Idealism and the Moral Self

In Emerson and Other Minds, Michael J. Colacurcio traces the long arc of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writings. While Emerson seldom argues academically in his essays, he intends the essays to be primary acts of philosophy. The essays are also highly wrought literary performances, and so they need to be closely read in the New Critical manner.

Colacurcio proposes that Emerson is one of modernity’s central writers on the question of "privacy": the unsettling epistemological fact that even though peo...