Mysticism and Language

Mysticism and Language PDF Author: Steven T. Katz
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Taken collectively, the original essays in this new collection make up the most important exploration of mysticism and language to appear in many years. Written from diverse perspectives on a wide variety of religious and mystical traditions, ranging from Judaism and Christianity to Zen Buddhism and Hinduism, all the essays exhibit great erudition, a mastery of the original mystical sources, and philosophical and hermeneutical sophistication. Further, all recognize the inadequacy of treating the questions surrounding this subject a-contextually - outside of their historic, intellectual, and sociological circumstances. As such, these studies deepen the on-going revisionist, contextualist study of mysticism so powerfully and influentially inaugurated by two previous collections also edited by Steven Katz, Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis and Mysticism and Religious Traditions. Like its predecessors, the present collection includes work by some of the world's leading authorities on mysticism, including Moshe Idel, William Alston, Bernard McGinn, Ewert Cousins, Bimal Matilal, Carl Ernst, and Steven Katz. It is sure to become essential reading for everyone interested in mysticism, as well as those who study religion, comparative religion, philosophy, and history.

Mysticism and Language

Mysticism and Language PDF Author: Steven T. Katz
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Taken collectively, the original essays in this new collection make up the most important exploration of mysticism and language to appear in many years. Written from diverse perspectives on a wide variety of religious and mystical traditions, ranging from Judaism and Christianity to Zen Buddhism and Hinduism, all the essays exhibit great erudition, a mastery of the original mystical sources, and philosophical and hermeneutical sophistication. Further, all recognize the inadequacy of treating the questions surrounding this subject a-contextually - outside of their historic, intellectual, and sociological circumstances. As such, these studies deepen the on-going revisionist, contextualist study of mysticism so powerfully and influentially inaugurated by two previous collections also edited by Steven Katz, Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis and Mysticism and Religious Traditions. Like its predecessors, the present collection includes work by some of the world's leading authorities on mysticism, including Moshe Idel, William Alston, Bernard McGinn, Ewert Cousins, Bimal Matilal, Carl Ernst, and Steven Katz. It is sure to become essential reading for everyone interested in mysticism, as well as those who study religion, comparative religion, philosophy, and history.

Language Mysticism

Language Mysticism PDF Author: Shira Wolosky
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804723879
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
Language Mysticism explores the place granted to language within metaphysical and theological hierarchies traditional to Western culture. Within these hierarchies, language represents embodiment, division, and historical differentiation; whereas silence points to an eternal unity beyond linguistic form and limitation. But this reflects a deeply embedded ambivalence in the Western tradition toward material and temporal conditions in general. The author uses the writings of T. S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, and Paul Celan to show how far-reaching and immediate this history of ambivalence remains in its influence and consequences. In each of these writers, theological traditions inform and situate linguistic imagery and practices, albeit in quite different ways. The author argues that the stances toward language of these three writers register values not only fundamental to their work but general to our culture. Language is the sign of body, of history, of difference; and a negative attitude toward language therefore implies a displacement of value away from concrete, historical condition. The approach to language of Eliot, Beckett, and Celan therefore inscribes their struggle to define and locate the values that endow our lives with meaning, and the possibility of translating these values into historical reality.

Mystical Languages of Unsaying

Mystical Languages of Unsaying PDF Author: Michael A. Sells
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226747875
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
The subject of Mystical Languages of Unsaying is an important but neglected mode of mystical discourse, apophasis. which literally means "speaking away." Sometimes translated as "negative theology," apophatic discourse embraces the impossibility of naming something that is ineffable by continually turning back upon its own propositions and names. In this close study of apophasis in Greek, Christian, and Islamic texts, Michael Sells offers a sustained, critical account of how apophatic language works, the conventions, logic, and paradoxes it employs, and the dilemmas encountered in any attempt to analyze it. This book includes readings of the most rigorously apophatic texts of Plotinus, John the Scot Eriugena, Ibn Arabi, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart, with comparative reference to important apophatic writers in the Jewish tradition, such as Abraham Abulafia and Moses de Leon. Sells reveals essential common features in the writings of these authors, despite their wide-ranging differences in era, tradition, and theology. By showing how apophasis works as a mode of discourse rather than as a negative theology, this work opens a rich heritage to reevaluation. Sells demonstrates that the more radical claims of apophatic writers—claims that critics have often dismissed as hyperbolic or condemned as pantheistic or nihilistic—are vital to an adequate account of the mystical languages of unsaying. This work also has important implications for the relationship of classical apophasis to contemporary languages of the unsayable. Sells challenges many widely circulated characterizations of apophasis among deconstructionists as well as a number of common notions about medieval thought and gender relations in medieval mysticism.

Between Mysticism and Philosophy

Between Mysticism and Philosophy PDF Author: Diana Lobel
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791493229
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Judah Ha-Levi (1075–1141), a medieval Jewish poet, mystic, and sophisticated critic of the rationalistic tradition in Judaism, is the focus of this ground-breaking study. Diana Lobel examines his influential philosophical dialogue, Sefer ha-Kuzari, written in Arabic and later translated into Hebrew, which broke religious and philosophical convention by infusing Sufi terms for religious experience with a new Jewish theological vision. Intellectually engaging, clear, and accessible, Between Mysticism and Philosophy is an indispensable resource for anyone interested in the intertwined worlds of Jewish and Islamic philosophy, religion, and culture.

Mysticism and Religious Traditions

Mysticism and Religious Traditions PDF Author: Steven T. Katz
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description


Mysticism and Meaning: Multidisciplinary Perspectives

Mysticism and Meaning: Multidisciplinary Perspectives PDF Author: Alex S. Kohav
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 193148340X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
The volume investigates the question of meaning of mystical phenomena and, conversely, queries the concept of "meaning" itself, via insights afforded by mystical experiences. The collection brings together researchers from such disparate fields as philosophy, psychology, history of religion, cognitive poetics, and semiotics, in an effort to ascertain the question of mysticism's meaning through pertinent, up-to-date multidisciplinarity. The discussion commences with Editor's Introduction that probes persistent questions of complexity as well as perplexity of mysticism and the reasons why problematizing mysticism leads to even greater enigmas. One thread within the volume provides the contextual framework for continuing fascination of mysticism that includes a consideration of several historical traditions as well as personal accounts of mystical experiences: Two contributions showcase ancient Egyptian and ancient Israelite involvements with mystical alterations of consciousness and Christianity's origins being steeped in mystical praxis; and four essays highlight mysticism's formative presence in Chinese traditions and Tibetan Buddhism as well as medieval Judaism and Kabbalah mysticism. A second, more overarching strand within the volume is concerned with multidisciplinary investigations of the phenomenon of mysticism, including philosophical, psychological, cognitive, and semiotic analyses. To this effect, the volume explores the question of philosophy's relation to mysticism and vice versa, together with a Wittgensteinian nexus between mysticism, facticity, and truth; language mysticism and "supernormal meaning" engendered by certain mystical states; cognitive-poetic analysis of mystical poetry; and a semiotic scrutiny of some mystical experiences and their ineffability. Finally, the volume includes an assessment of the so-called New Age authors' contention of the convergence of scientific and mystical claims about reality. The above two tracks are appended with personal, contemporary accounts of mystical experiences, in the Prologue; and a futuristic envisioning, as a fictitious chronicle from the time-to-come, of life without things mystical, in the Postscript. The volume contains fourteen chapters; its international contributors are based in Canada, Israel, United Kingdom, and the United States.

Wittgenstein: From Mysticism to Ordinary Language

Wittgenstein: From Mysticism to Ordinary Language PDF Author: Russell Nieli
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438414714
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Wittgenstein: From Mysticism to Ordinary Language presents the Tractatus as a work of mystic theology intended to direct the reader to a transcendental plane from which human existence can be viewed from the divine perspective. More than any other work on Wittgenstein, this study integrates text material with personal biographical information, especially information dealing with his spiritual and psychological states. The result is a fresh, coherent, and extremely illuminating picture of Wittgenstein, successfully avoiding the pitfalls of either psychological reductionism or unfaithfulness to the text. It is bold without being reckless, passionately argued without being doctrinaire, and makes a very powerful and persuasive case for its main thesis.

Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis

Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis PDF Author: Steven T. Katz
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 9780195200119
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Mystical and religious experience are subjects which are constantly under investigation by both the religiously sensitive and, in a more general way, by those interested in the phenomenon. This comprehensive study by a group of distinguished American and British scholars sympathetically and objectively deals with mystical experience in Christianity, Judaism, and Eastern religions.

An Introduction to the Study of Mysticism

An Introduction to the Study of Mysticism PDF Author: Richard H. Jones
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438486340
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
2022 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title The purpose of this book is to fill a gap in contemporary mystical studies: an overview of the basic ways to approach mystical experiences and mysticism. It discusses the problem of definitions of “mystical experiences” and “mysticism” and advances characterizations of “mystical experiences” in terms of certain altered states of consciousness and “mysticism” in terms of encompassing ways of life centered on such experiences and states. Types of mystical experiences, enlightened states, paths, and doctrines are discussed, as is the relation of mystical experiences and mysticism to religions and cultures. The approaches of constructivism, contextualism, essentialism, and perennialism are presented. Themes in the history of the world’s major mystical traditions are set forth. Approaches to mystical phenomena in sociology, psychology, gender studies, and neuroscience are introduced. Basic philosophical issues related to whether mystical experiences are veridical and mystical claims valid, mystics’ problems of language, art, and morality are laid out. Older and newer comparative approaches in religious studies and in Christian theology are discussed, along with postmodernist objections. The intended audience is undergraduates and the general public interested in the general issues related to mysticism.

The Mystical Language of Sensation in the Later Middle Ages

The Mystical Language of Sensation in the Later Middle Ages PDF Author: Gordon Rudy
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136718400
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
First Published in 2002. This book is about the way medieval authors wrote about union with God and how they used language that refers to the senses to articulate their ideas about how a person can be one with God. Rudy argues that such explicit concepts of the spiritual senses are not sharply distinct from the ideas implicit in broader usage of sensory language in theological writings. These ideas are significant in the history of Christian mysticism, because language that refers to the senses bears directly on several ideas that are central to ideas about union with God.