From My Writings and My Evenings: Essays on Thoughts and Truth

It is late in the evening and a philosopher wants to get words on paper. No grand project. No grand system of thought, just an attempt to get some things off his chest. Where would he turn his attention? Where would his thoughts lead him? Several catch phrases become crystallization points for his thoughts: thinking, the nature of man, the art of living, God and religion, Jews and anti-Semitism, crime and punishment, education, arts and science, language and literature, history and the state. Dagobert D. Runes put in much effort to avoid the pursuit of false ideas. In fact, the preface to From My Writings and My Evenings reads: "Hesitancy in judgment is the true mark of the thinker. Men think quite alike as they desire alike; if they were different, they could not co-exist even for a day. But most people judge by traditional or imitated judgment patterns, and snap judgments are the rule and the rulers." How is one to avoid the pitfalls apparent in such judgments, and still contribute to one's personal philosophy? If you are hesitant in your judgments, then what can you state that you believe to be unquestionably true? The result is a touching document of a philosopher who investigates many areas of man's endeavors, and who seeks to characterize what he judges to be the pure, true nature of these realms.

About the Author :
Born in 1903 in Czernowitz, Bukowina, Romania, Dagobert D. Runes obtained a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Vienna and immigrated to New York City in 1926. He brought with him a strong bond to many of Europe's most notable German-speaking scholars, including Albert Einstein. By 1930, he had published many diverse periodicals, including Modern Psychologist, whose godfather was Alfred Adler, with whom Runes had a lifelong friendship; Better English: A Monthly Guide for the Improvement of Speech and Writing (with contributions from Dale Carnegie, H.L. Menken, W.H. Auden, and Emily Post); and The Modern Thinker and Authors' Review (with articles by Julian Huxley, Upton Sinclair, Bertrand Russell, Sigmund Freud, Leon Trotsky, and Thomas Mann). His magazine, The New Current Digest, was purchased by Reader's Digest; with that money, in 1941, he founded Philosophical Library, which published the work of brilliant European intellectuals and Nobel Prize winners with whom he had been friends. He authored the Dictionary of Philosophy, which became a treasured possession of every student of philosophy. Translated into numerous languages, it sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Philosophical Library was so respected that it had blanket orders from most libraries for every book that it published. War Medicine, Modern Methods of Amputation, and Rehabilitation of the War Injured, for instance, were bought by every military library and doctor's office. In the late 1940s, Runes introduced French Existentialism to the English-speaking world, and translated and published the works of Jean-Paul Sartre (including his seminal Being and Nothingness), Simone de Beauvoir, Andre Gide, and Francois Mauriac, among others. Throughout his life, Dagobert D. Runes was deeply concerned with human and civil rights, man's inhumanity to man and, as he wrote in one of his poems, "the deep beauty of the human mind." Until his death in 1982, Runes directed Philosophical Library and Wisdom Library (his paperback house) and published thought-provoking philosophical works by himself and others.