John T. Lysaker works between and weaves together questions and replies in philosophical psychology, Emerson studies, and ethics in this book of deep existential questioning.

How do I live a good life, one that is deeply personal and sensitive to others? John T. Lysaker suggests that those who take this question seriously need to reexamine the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

"Not limited to a single poem or collection of poems, ur-poetry arises when, in the interaction of an author's principal tropes, the origin of poetry is exposed as a process whereby words with inherited meaning take on a new poetic life ...

To appreciate the album's multifaceted character, Lysaker advocates for "prismatic listening," an attentiveness that continually shifts registers in the knowledge that no single approach can grasp the work as a whole.

In Hope, Trust, and Forgiveness, John T. Lysaker draws our attention to the ways in which hope, trust, and forgiveness are capacities that intimately contend with the finitude of ethical life.

Philosophy’s relation to the act of writing is John T. Lysaker’s main concern in Philosophy, Writing, and the Character of Thought.

In place of some previously established interpretive method (e.g. structuralism), Heidegger defers to the poetics obliquely articulated in the key words, phrases, and stanzas of the work in question, what I term an 'Ur-poem'.