Alan Watts-Here and Now: Contributions to Psychology, Philosophy, and Religion (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781438442006)

Alan Watts--Here and Now explores the intellectual legacy and continuing relevance of a prolific writer and speaker who was a major influence on American culture during the latter half of the twentieth century. A thinker attuned to the spiritual malaise affecting the Western mind, Watts (1915-1973) provided intellectual and spiritual alternatives that helped shape the Beat culture of the 1950s and the counterculture of the 1960s. Well known for introducing Buddhist and Daoist spirituality to a wide Western audience, he also wrote on psychology, mysticism, and psychedelic experience. Many idolized Watts as a guru-mystic, yet he was also dismissed as intellectually shallow and as a mere popularizer of Asian religions (the "Norman Vincent Peale of Zen"). Both critical and appreciative, this edited volume locates Watts at the forefront of major paradigmatic shifts in Western intellectual life. Contributors explore how Watts's work resonates in present-day scholarship on psychospiritual transformation, Buddhism and psychotherapy, Daoism in the West, phenomenology and hermeneutics, humanistic and transpersonal psychology, mysticism, and ecofeminism, among other areas.

Author: Peter J. Columbus
ISBN-10: 1438442009
ISBN-13: 9781438442006
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Language: English
Published: 01/02/2013
Pages: 263
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.25lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 1.00d