Zweck

Have you ever wondered: How it feels to be eponymous? Why some German pigeons were painted blue in the First World War? What connects Rachmaninoff to Chief Sitting Bull? It is 1972. Bernard Robins is in London – American, innocent, uninformed and arrogant – to make his name and fortune as a pianist, composer and conductor. He lives at the Kensington Music Society, a haven for aspiring musicians, including afro-headed violinists, cellists in caftans and coloraturas from Colorado. During his time there, Bernard accidentally encounters his long lost great-uncle, Hermann Heinrich Zweck, a nonagenarian – a once eminent, now forgotten composer, who has known most of the great musical figures of the Twentieth Century and hated almost all of them. Zweck is engaged in a war against stupidity, laziness and cowardice with the entire world, and especially with Bernard and Charles Forsythe – a hapless English musicologist whose only crime, (grievous in Zweck's view) is to be both English and an academic. The romantic relationships the three principals have with strong women, ranging from promiscuity to endless love, change the lives of all concerned. Throughout the novel, Zweck engages in a battle of words with the author in a series of interruptions and monologues. Comically written by an author skilled in both writing and music, Zweck is an accessible and hilarious novel about fame, identity, music and dumplings.

A new translation of Kant's 1797 The Metaphysics of Morals into modern American English with the original German manuscript in the back for reference. This is Volume XII in the Complete Works of Immanuel Kant published by Newcomb Livraria Press This is not to be confused with his early 1785 work Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, which is a different book. In keeping with the grounded, practical themes of his later works, the metaphysician of Prussia’s Die Metaphysik der Sitten focuses on law, government regulation and virtue. Law is the inevitable end of Reason, and as such, is rooted in a priori principles native to the soul but not external experience, in other words, metaphysical. The imperative of virtue relies on inner compulsion, while the imperative of legality relies on an external compulsion. In his lifelong rage against the Empiricism of David Hume, Kant here builds a positive framework devoid of polemics. Kant’s “Doctrine of Right” would inspire Hegel’s 1820 Philosophy of Right, where he would develop a more robust legal theory and a more restrictive social contract.