Author: Montague Brown
Publisher: Catholic University of America Press
ISBN: 0813233518
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 329
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Book Description
Any realist metaphysics must include an integrated account of the transcendentals and the analogy of being, for an adequate metaphysics must be about everything, and all things share in some key metaphysical characteristic—being, unity, truth, goodness, and beauty. However, they do not share in them in exactly the same way. Therefore, there is need to explain the transcendental characteristics in an analogical way. By using the phrase “transcendental analogies,” Reason, Revelation and Metaphysics claims that there are analogies of unity, truth, goodness, and beauty, which are related to, but irreducible to, the analogy of being. As this book is a systematic study of the topic, theoretical reason has primacy in the project and metaphysics is given pride of place. But reason is practical and aesthetic as well; that is, our consciences urge us to seek what is good, and we are delighted by what is beautiful. Although goodness and beauty are not reducible to truth, they must be included in any adequate metaphysical account, for metaphysics looks to explain everything. Although metaphysics is traditionally thought to be a philosophical project involving ontology and natural theology, Montague Brown argues that an adequate metaphysics must ultimately be theological, including within its scope the truths of revelation. Philosophical reason’s examination of the transcendental analogies raises questions that it cannot answer. We experience a world of many beings, truths, goods, and beauties. Recognizing that these many instances have something in common, we affirm a transcendent instance of each (traditionally called God). However, although we know that a transcendent instance exists, we do not know its nature: therefore, we cannot say how it is related to the other instances. If we try to apply this transcendent instance as the prime analogate to shed light on the other analogates, we must fail, for the abstractness and universality of the transcendent instance can add nothing to our understanding of the particular instances. Wanting to know how the many exist and are related, philosophical reason finds no way forward and recognizes its need for help. It is the thesis of this book that reason finds this help only in the revelation of the God’s covenantal relation with the world. The first principle of all things—most perfectly revealed in Jesus Christ, perfect God and perfect man—is really and freely related to us. Only by accepting this revealed prime analogate can the transcendental analogies bear fruit in our ongoing quest for understanding.
Author: Geoffrey Mondello
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781980898597
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 651
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Book Description
Mysticism is a phenomenon fraught with nuances, both linguistic and metaphysical. The Metaphysics, consequently, as a philosophic work, presumes to address issues of a nature less than congenial to the universe of ordinary discourse. Philosophy, to be sure, demands a rigorous language, a syntax, if you will, that is subtly antagonistic to the fluid and sometimes extremely volatile concepts intrinsic to the phenomenon of the mystical experience. The austere language that philosophy arrogates to itself is sometimes too rigid a probe to uncover, reveal, the subtle and often delicate complexities that inevitably arise in a careful examination of mysticism; hence a sometimes involuted terminology will be encountered in our fragile attempt to render linguistic what merely verges on becoming intelligible. I have, to the best of my ability, limited this proliferation of abstruse language applied to an already abstruse subject. I have attempted to keep neologisms to a minimal, but have not blenched from employing them when my own linguistic resources are exhausted. Notwithstanding the difficulties inevitably encountered in language, I have endeavored in this work not simply to clarify what is obscure, but to address what is unique and compelling in this type of experience, an experience that has challenged philosophy for something more than a parenthetical account, an account, more often than not, much too eager to either dismiss this phenomenon, or to relegate it to psychology through its own failure to provide it with an adequate epistemological framework. Philosophy, in a word, has not yet coherently responded to this challenge. I am not satisfied that I have done so to the extent required, and many readers will no doubt concur with my assessment. Nevertheless it is a beginning of sorts, and if it provokes more questions than it answers it will at least have served to rehabilitate the philosophical arrogance that has been too ready to dismiss what it finds uncongenial. Hence the impetus of this work. But why St. John of the Cross? Why not Eckhardt, Gerson, or Tauler? Even the briefest historical survey of the great Western Christian Mystics offers, especially in the way of speculative mysticism, a wide variety of other and perhaps better known candidates. The reason that I have chosen St. John is simply this: the works of St. John of the Cross, particularly the Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Dark Night of the Soul, stand, I think, as the culmination of the Western tradition of mysticism. On the other hand, it is equally important to the reader to understand what this book is not. This book is not a compendium. While it carefully attempts to chronologically accompany the text where possible, it does not blench from a departure where an examination of concurrent issues is warranted. Some will undoubtedly find this vexing. And while it adverts to the Mystical Tradition in general, a tradition out of which the thought of St. John very clearly emerges, it does not presume to exhaustively treat of the many notable figures who have contributed to this long-standing tradition. Deidre Carabine's "The Unknown God: Negative Theology in the Platonic Tradition: Plato to Eriugena", I suggest, would be much more suitable to this purpose. The goal of this book is unabashedly epistemological. Neither do I presume the reader to be intimately acquainted with Thomism as such, from which many of the metaphysical doctrines articulated by St. John unquestionably derive. For the sake of clarity, and the convenience of the reader, I have endeavored to reiterate them when necessary, providing pertinent documentation should the reader wish to explore the issue further. As dearly as I wish this work to be all things to all people, I have settled for the more modest goal of providing epistemological perspective on the sometimes fluid, sometimes volatile, but always paradoxical issues that mysticism perpetually engenders.
Author: Edward Kanterian
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351395815
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 542
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Book Description
Kant is widely acknowledged as the greatest philosopher of modern times. He undertook his famous critical turn to save human freedom and morality from the challenge of determinism and materialism. Intertwined with his metaphysical interests, however, he also had theological commitments, which have received insufficient attention. He believed that man is a fallen creature and in need of ‘redemption’. He intended to provide a fortress protecting religious faith from the failure of rationalist metaphysics, from the atheistic strands of the Enlightenment, from the new mathematical science of nature, and from the dilemmas of Christian theology itself. Kant was an epistemologist, a philosopher of mind, a metaphysician of experience, an ethicist and a philosopher of religion. But all this was sustained by his religious faith. This book aims to recover the focal point and inner contradictions of his thought, the ‘secret thorn’ of his metaphysics (as Heidegger once put it). It first locates Kant in the tradition of reflection on the human weakness from Luther to Hume, and then engages in a critical, but charitable, manner with Kant’s entire pre-critical work, including his posthumous fragments. Special attention is given to The Only Possible Ground (1763), one of the most difficult, interesting and underestimated of Kant’s works. The present book takes its cue from an older approach to Kant, but also engages with recent Anglophone and continental scholarship, and deploys modern analytical tools to make sense of Kant. What emerges is an innovative and thought-provoking interpretation of Kant’s metaphysics, set against the background of forgotten religious aspects of European philosophy.
Author: Patrick Masterson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1623562678
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 345
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Book Description
Approaching God explores the ways in which phenomenology, metaphysics and theological enquiry can throw light upon each other. This is a matter of great interest and importance to the future of philosophical theology and the philosophy of religion. What, if anything, has philosophical reflection about God to contribute to Christian theology? And if indeed philosophy plays a positive role in theological reflection-what kind of philosophy? The first-person philosophical perspective of phenomenology or the objective philosophical perspective of metaphysics? Masterson devotes three chapters to, respectively, phenomenological, metaphysical, and theological approaches to God. Each are seen as animated by a first principle from which a comprehensive account of everything is said to follow-'Human Consciousness' in the case of phenomenology; 'Being' in the case of metaphysics; and 'God' in the case of theology. Although philosophers and theologians such as Ricoeur, Levinas, Kearney, Caputo, and Barth are considered briefly, Approaching God essentially provides a dialogue about theological and theistic issues between the phenomenological approach of the leading French Christian phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion and the realist metaphysical approach of Aquinas. Masterson maintains that all three approaches are needed in trying to speak appropriately about God-they are irreducible but complementary.
Author: Jean-Luc Marion
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198757735
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 161
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Book Description
This work is based on Professor Marion's Gifford Lectures at the University of Glasgow.
Author: Alexander Stern
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674240634
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 401
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Book Description
In the most comprehensive account to date of Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of language, Alexander Stern explores the nature of meaning by putting Benjamin in dialogue with Wittgenstein. Known largely for his essays on culture, aesthetics, and literature, Walter Benjamin also wrote on the philosophy of language. This early work is famously obscure and considered hopelessly mystical by some. But for Alexander Stern, it contains important insights and anticipates—in some respects surpasses—the later thought of a central figure in the philosophy of language, Ludwig Wittgenstein. As described in The Fall of Language, Benjamin argues that “language as such” is not a means for communicating an extra-linguistic reality but an all-encompassing medium of expression in which everything shares. Borrowing from Johann Georg Hamann’s understanding of God’s creation as communication to humankind, Benjamin writes that all things express meanings, and that human language does not impose meaning on the objective world but translates meanings already extant in it. He describes the transformations that language as such undergoes while making its way into human language as the “fall of language.” This is a fall from “names”—language that responds mimetically to reality—to signs that designate reality arbitrarily. While Benjamin’s approach initially seems alien to Wittgenstein’s, both reject a designative understanding of language; both are preoccupied with Russell’s paradox; and both try to treat what Wittgenstein calls “the bewitchment of our understanding by means of language.” Putting Wittgenstein’s work in dialogue with Benjamin’s sheds light on its historical provenance and on the turn in Wittgenstein’s thought. Although the two philosophies diverge in crucial ways, in their comparison Stern finds paths for understanding what language is and what it does.
Author: William Desmond
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268201595
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 415
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Book Description
Godsends is William Desmond’s newest addition to his masterwork on the borderlines between philosophy and theology. For many years, William Desmond has been patiently constructing a philosophical project—replete with its own terminology, idiom, grammar, dialectic, and its metaxological transformation—in an attempt to reopen certain boundaries: between metaphysics and phenomenology, between philosophy of religion and philosophical theology, between the apocalyptic and the speculative, and between religious passion and systematic reasoning. In Godsends, Desmond’s newest addition to his ambitious masterwork, he presents an original reflection on what he calls the “companioning” of philosophy and religion. Throughout the book, he follows an itinerary that has something of an Augustinian likeness: from the exterior to the interior, from the inferior to the superior. The stations along the way include a grappling with the default atheism prevalent in contemporary intellectual culture; an exploration of the middle space, the metaxu between the finite and the infinite; a dwelling with solitudes as thresholds between selving and the sacred; a meditation on idiot wisdom and transcendence in an East-West perspective; an exploration of the different stresses in the mysticisms of Aurobindo and the Arnhem Mystical Sermons; a dream monologue of autonomy, a suite of Kantian and post-Kantian variations on the story of the prodigal son; a meditation on the beatitudes as exceeding virtue, in light of Aquinas’s understanding; and culminating in an exploration of Godsends as telling us something significant about the surprise of revelation in word, idea, and story. Godsends is written for thoughtful persons and scholars perplexed about the place of religion in our time and hopeful for some illuminating companionship from relevant philosophers. It will also interest students of philosophy and religion, especially philosophical theology and philosophical metaphysics.
Author: Christian Jambet
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 508
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Book Description
Exploring the thought of Mulla Sadra Shirazi, an Iranian Shi'ite of the seventeenth century: a universe of politics, morality, liberty, and order that is indispensable to our understanding of Islamic thought and spirituality.
Author: Gregory B. Sadler
Publisher: CUA Press
ISBN: 0813217210
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 329
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Book Description
This selection of previously untranslated documents from the French debates about Christian philosophy provides a long-needed complement to available English-language literature on the subject.
Author: Leora Batnitzky
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521861564
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas, two twentieth-century Jewish philosophers and two extremely provocative thinkers whose reputations have grown considerably, are rarely studied together. This is due to the disparate interests of many of their intellectual heirs. Strauss has influenced political theorists and policy makers on the right while Levinas has been championed in the humanities by different cadres associated with postmodernist thought. In Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation, first published in 2006, Leora Batnitzky brings together these two seemingly incongruous contemporaries, demonstrating that they often had the same philosophical sources and their projects had many formal parallels. While such a comparison is valuable in itself for better understanding each figure, it also raises profound questions in the debate on the definitions of 'religion', suggesting ways that religion makes claims on both philosophy and politics.
