Fons Vitae

Drawing on Arabic passages from Ibn Gabirol's original Fons Vitae text, and highlighting philosophical insights from his Hebrew poetry, Sarah Pessin develops a 'theology of desire' at the heart of Ibn Gabirol's eleventh-century cosmo-ontology. She challenges centuries of received scholarship on his work, including his so-called Doctrine of Divine Will. Pessin rejects voluntarist readings of the Fons Vitae as opposing divine emanation. She also emphasizes pseudo-Empedoclean notions of 'divine desire' and 'grounding element' alongside Ibn Gabirol's use of a particularly Neoplatonic method with apophatic (and what she terms 'doubly apophatic') implications. In this way, Pessin reads claims about matter and God as insights about love, desire, and the receptive, dependent and fragile nature of human beings. Pessin reenvisions the entire spirit of Ibn Gabirol's philosophy, moving us from a set of doctrines to a fluid inquiry into the nature of God and human being – and the bond between God a

A collectible hardcover edition of a 1946 Filipino American classic set in the U.S. in the 1930s about a Filipino migrant laborer who endures racial violence and struggles with the paradox of the American dreamA Penguin Vitae EditionPoet, essayist, novelist, fiction writer, and labor organizer, Carlos Bulosan (1911–1956) wrote one of the most influential working class literary classics about the United States pre-World War II, a period and setting similar to that of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Cannery Row. Bulosan’s semi-autobiographical novel America Is in the Heart begins with the narrator’s rural childhood in the Philippines and the struggles of land-poor peasant families affected by US imperialism after the Spanish American War of the late 1890s. Bulosan’s experiences with other Filipino migrant laborers, who endured intense racial abuse in the fields, orchards, towns, cities, and canneries of California and the Pacific Northwest in the 1930s, reexamine the ideals of the Am