Class Acts
James Giles has released his new album, A Man in the Alley. It is available on Spotify, Apple Music, iTunes, and other digital music stores. Giles is an artist who explores human experience with his music and lyrics. His sounds are a blend of rock, folk, ambient, and indie styles. Giles says that he immerses his listeners in specific moments of awareness – love, loss, desire, fear – to melodically and poetically develop them to the point where they become the essence of awareness.
He also has a new book out. The Way of Awareness in Daoist Philosophy explores ancient Daoist philosophy and argues against interpretations that paint the early Daoist philosophers as mystics or cosmologists. It claims that Dao is best understood as awareness and that it is concerned primarily with the nature of human experience, meditation, and relation to the world. The book is both a scholarly examination of Chinese and cross-cultural philosophy as well as an original work on ethics, metaphysics, and the philosophy of mind.
