Ralph Waldo Emerson developed a metaphysics of process, an epistemology of moods, and an 'existentialist' ethics of self-improvement, drawing on sources including Neoplatonism, Kantianism, Hinduism, and the skepticism of Montaigne. In this book, Russell B. Goodman demonstrates how Emerson's essays embody oppositions – one and many, fixed and flowing, nominalism and realism – and argues, in tracing Emerson's main positions, that we miss the living nature of his philosophy unless we take account of the motions and patterns of his essays and the ways in which instability, spontaneity, and inconsistency are dramatized within them. Goodman presents Emerson as a philosopher in conversation with Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, William James, Wittgenstein, and Cavell. He finds a variety of skepticisms in Emerson's work – about friendship, language, freedom, and the world's existence – but also an acknowledgement of skepticism as a 'wise' form of life.

‘Whether offering revisionary readings of Emerson in relation to Montaigne's contrarian skepticism, William James's varieties of religious experience, and Cavell's epistemology of moods, or redefining our understandings of his encounters with Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein, this book brilliantly choreographs the movements of contrariety in Emerson's living thought, and conjures a striking ‘mode of illumination' that will light the way for both seasoned Emerson scholars and those encountering him for the first time.'

Michael Jonik - University of Sussex