Perfection: Coming to Terms with Being Human - Hardcover

Hyde, Michael J.

3.67

6 ratings by Goodreads

9781602582446: Perfection: Coming to Terms with Being Human

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1602582440 ISBN 13: 9781602582446

Publisher: Baylor University Press, 2010

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In a masterful survey of the history of the idea of human perfection, prize-winning author and noted rhetorician Michael J. Hyde leads a fascinating excursion through Western philosophy, religion, science, and art. Eloquently and engagingly he delves the canon of Western thought, drawing on figures from St. Augustine and John Rawls to Leonardo da Vinci and David Hume to Kenneth Burke and Mary Shelley. On the journey, Hyde expounds on the very notion and Otherness of God, the empirical and ontological workings of daily existence, the development of reason, and the bounds of beauty. In the end, he ponders the consequences of the perfection-driven impulse of medical science and considers the implications of the bourgeoning rhetoric of our posthuman future. It is nothing short of a triumphant examination of why we humans are challenged to live a life of significant insignificance.

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About the Author:

Michael J. Hyde is University Distinguished Professor of Communication Ethics in the Department of Communication and is on the faculty of the Program for Bioethics, Health and Society in the School of Medicine, Wake Forest University. He is the author of The Life-Giving Gift of Acknowledgment, The Ethos of Rhetoric, and award-winning The Call of Conscience. He and his wife live in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Review:

An expansive and daring book about the complexity of the human project, its possibilities, its limitations, and its inscrutable ambiguity. --Walter Brueggeman, Professor Emeritus, Columbia Theological Seminary

I enthusiastically recommend what is sure to be another award-winning book by Michael Hyde. --Barry Brummett, Charles Sapp Centennial Professor in Communication, University of Texas - Austin

...interesting, engaging, and informative in a way that draws the reader in.... This book should be of interest to a large readership from scholars to lay readers; highly recommended for philosophy and cultural studies collections. --Library Journal, 1/15/2010

This is everything we have come to expect of Michael Hyde's prolific authorship and yet another testament of his meticulous and wide-ranging scholarship, his attentiveness to details, his keen sense of argument, and his skill in carrying conversations across disciplinary demarcations. For it, we all stand in his debt. --Calvin O. Schrag, George Ade Distinguished Professor of Philospohy Emeritus, Purdue University

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