Being and Learning

In the end, Being and Learning can be read in any number of ways, but above all I think it must be read with love. This is not to say that one must love the book or its author, but, rather, that without love it is impossible to read poetry poetically. A prosaic reading of the poetic will always reap what it sows. A poetic reading is generous, critical, insistent, serious, and always willing to dance. This is the chief triumph of Duarte's book: it stands as an obstacle and invitation to learning, under the precise, aesthetic/ontological conditions of learning provided. This is a book about the immense rigor of having an idea. The labor of (re)birth. For Duarte, to have an idea is not the unique creation of a concept from nothing, but, instead, the much more difficult work of giving birth to something that is as old as it is new, as primordial as it is original. This is a book about a personal and perennial struggle to practice the art of philosophy as a seamless and continuous act of the art of teaching and the demands of the whole that extend into the community and its constitutive conditions. In short, Duarte's book is a strenuous attempt to think and feel and live. The key to Being and Learning, then, is simply a question of whether the reader shares that ambition or not. -Sam Rocha, reviewing Being and Learning in the journal Studies in Philosophy and Education