Practice in Still Life: Fragments, Essays, and Lectures
Now available in paperback, Kindle, and ebook editions
Dear readers,
After several months of quiet work — writing, revising, and refining — I’m happy to share that I’ve just published a new essay collection titled Practice in Still Life: Fragments, Essays, and Lectures.
A study of saints, mystics, monastics, and philosophers, the book explores how philosophical and contemplative practices transform our perception and understanding of reality. The fuller details about the book, including a free preview of the introduction, are available below.
The collection is now available in three formats:
In the weeks ahead, I’ll also be serializing a few selections from the book here on The Base Camp to share some excerpts of the work with you all.
If you’ve found value in the writing I publish here, consider picking up a copy for yourself or for someone in your circles who might appreciate a practice-oriented philosophical book.
Proceeds directly support the ongoing research and writing I do here.
I’m also happy to send a review copy to anyone interested in covering the book in a newsletter, podcast, journal, or other venue. Feel free to reach out to ae.robbert@gmail.com.
One final note: this book is, in part, an experiment — not only in content, but in form and distribution. While traditional academic publishing remains vital to scholarly life, new forms of knowledge transmission are emerging that can complement these established channels.
These more direct modes of sharing create space for public philosophical discourse and sustained intellectual attention. With its mix of fragments, essays, and lectures offered directly to readers, I hope this work contributes to that broader possibility, cultivating serious thought both within and outside of traditional institutional frameworks, while remaining grounded in philosophical rigor.
Thanks for reading. Those full details are just below.
Sincerely,
Adam
The Essay Collection
Over the course of 2024, I published 22 pieces of varying lengths through this newsletter — from short philosophical fragments to longer essays and adapted lectures from talks I gave in the SF Bay Area and elsewhere. Practice in Still Life: Fragments, Essays, and Lectures gathers and refines these pieces into 15 chapters, along with a comprehensive new introduction.
Readers of this newsletter may recognize many of the titles and themes, but this collection is more than a direct port of the newsletter into a printed book. Each piece has been expanded, revised, and restructured to meet the different demands — and affordances — of the longer-form book format. The whole volume has also been typeset and designed with a readable aesthetic in mind.
The book runs just over 65,000 words and includes a full glossary of key Greek and Latin philosophical terms, with extended etymologies and definitions. It engages a wide range of figures, including Simone Weil, Charles Taylor, William James, St. Augustine, St. Gregory of Nyssa, Evagrius Ponticus, St. Thomas Aquinas, Dionysius the Areopagite, Plato, Pierre Hadot, Hugh of St. Victor, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Nishitani Keiji, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, and more.
You can download the introduction for free by clicking the link below.
Overview
16 chapters exploring the link between practice and perception
Structured progressively from fragments to essays to lectures
Includes a glossary of Greek and Latin philosophical terms with etymologies
Explores how contemplation (theōria) and spiritual exercise (askēsis) shape perception and our engagement with reality
Integrates phenomenological, philosophical, and theological perspectives
Argues for a practice-oriented defense of the humanities in the 21st century
Draws from mystics (Dionysius the Areopagite, author of The Cloud of Unknowing), saints (Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, Thomas Aquinas), philosophers (Plato, Nietzsche, Heidegger), modern scholars (William Desmond, Charles Taylor, Pierre Hadot, Simone Kotva), contemplatives (Hugh of St. Victor, Evagrius Ponticus, Simone Weil, Nishitani Keiji), and historians (Mary Carruthers)
Description
Practice in Still Life explores how philosophical and contemplative traditions transform our perception and understanding of reality. Through a series of fragments, essays, and lectures, these pieces show how practice fundamentally shapes our way of being in the world and the aesthetic nature of perception itself. By studying the works of saints, mystics, monastics, and philosophers, A.E. Robbert demonstrates how different modes of attention — both intellectual investigation and contemplative practice — serve as complementary vehicles for philosophical illumination.
Central to this work is how askēsis (spiritual exercise) mediates and joins us together with the reality we bring to presence through practice. The ideas and figures treated herein are varied in senses at once historical, disciplinary, and existential, dealing in themes from phenomenology, philosophy, and religion alike. Equal parts practical and metaphysical, first personal and theological, they engage questions of perception and agency but also transcendence and immanence. Written for thoughtful readers in academia and beyond, these pieces illustrate how philosophical practice remains essential today for developing deeper ways of perceiving and engaging with the world and what lies within and beyond it.
Thank you for sharing!
It's a little frightening how much the description of this book looks algorithmically designed to appeal to me. I'm planning on getting it, but I need to finish some of my own writing first. I can't remember the last time I put a philosophy book in the treat-for-finishing-work category. Maybe there's hope for my soul yet.