The Intimate Strangeness of Being

The Intimate Strangeness of Being PDF Author: William Desmond
Publisher: CUA Press
ISBN: 0813219604
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
This book explores the contested place of metaphysics since Kant and Hegel, arguing for a renewed metaphysical thinking about the intimate strangeness of being.

The Intimate Strangeness of Being

The Intimate Strangeness of Being PDF Author: William Desmond
Publisher: CUA Press
ISBN: 0813219604
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 346

Get Book

Book Description
This book explores the contested place of metaphysics since Kant and Hegel, arguing for a renewed metaphysical thinking about the intimate strangeness of being.

The Gift of Beauty and the Passion of Being

The Gift of Beauty and the Passion of Being PDF Author: William Desmond
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1532617100
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
This book gathers a set of reflections on the gift of beauty and the passion of being. There is something surprising about beauty that we receive and that moves the passion of being in us. The book takes issue with an ambiguous attitude to beauty among some who proclaim their advanced aesthetic authenticity. Beauty seems bland and lacks the more visceral thrill of the ugly, indeed the excremental. We crave what disrupts and provokes us, not what gives delight or even consoles. By contrast, attention is given to how beauty arouses enigmatic joy in us, and we enjoy an elemental rapport with it as other. Surprised by beauty, our breath is taken away, but we are more truly there with the beautiful when we are taken outside of ourselves. We are first receivers of the gift of surprise and only then perceivers and conceivers. My attention to the passion of being stresses a patience, a receptivity to what is other. What happens is not first our construction. There is something given, something awakening, something delighting, something energizing, something of invitation to transcendence. The theme is amplified in diverse reflections: on life and its transient beauty; on soul music and its relation to self; on the shine on things given in creation; on beauty and Schopenhauer’s dark origin; on creativity and the dynamis in Paul Weiss’s creative ventures; on redemption in Romanticism in the thought of Stanley Cavell; on theater as a between or metaxu; on redeeming laughter and its connection with the passion of being.

Spiritual Exercises for a Secular Age

Spiritual Exercises for a Secular Age PDF Author: Ryan G. Duns, SJ
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268108153
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 477

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Book Description
In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor, faced with contemporary challenges to belief, issues a call for “new and unprecedented itineraries” that might be capable of leading seekers to encounter God. In Spiritual Exercises for a Secular Age, Ryan G. Duns demonstrates that William Desmond’s philosophy has the resources to offer a compelling response to Taylor. To show how, Duns makes use of the work of Pierre Hadot. In Hadot’s view, the point of philosophy is “not to inform but to form”—that is, not to provide abstract answers to abstruse questions but rather to form the human being such that she can approach reality as such in a new way. Drawing on Hadot, Duns frames Desmond’s metaphysical thought as a form of spiritual exercise. So framed, Duns argues, Desmond’s metaphysics attunes its readers to perceive disclosure of the divine in the everyday. Approached in this way, studying Desmond’s metaphysics can transform how readers behold reality itself by attuning them to discern the presence of God, who can be sought, and disclosed through, all things in the world. Spiritual Exercises for a Secular Age offers a readable and engaging introduction to the thought of Charles Taylor and William Desmond, and demonstrates how practicing metaphysics can be understood as a form of spiritual exercise that renews in its practitioners an attentiveness to God in all things. As a unique contribution at the crossroads of theology and philosophy, it will appeal to readers in continental philosophy, theology, and religious studies broadly.

In the Slender Margin

In the Slender Margin PDF Author: Eve Joseph
Publisher: Skyhorse
ISBN: 162872627X
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
Like Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, an extraordinarily moving and engaging look at loss and death. Eve Joseph is an award-winning poet who worked for twenty years as a palliative care counselor in a hospice. When she was a young girl, she lost a much older brother, and her experience as a grown woman helping others face death, dying, and grief opens the path for her to recollect and understand his loss in a way she could not as a child. In the Slender Margin is an insider's look at an experience that awaits us all, and that is at once deeply fascinating, frightening, and in modern society shunned. The book is an intimate invitation to consider death and our response to it without fear or morbidity, but rather with wonder and a curious mind. Writing with a poet's precise language and in short meditative chapters leavened with insight, warmth, and occasional humor, Joseph cites her hospice experience as well as the writings of others across generations—from the realms of mythology, psychology, science, religion, history, and literature—to illuminate the many facets of dying and death. Offering examples from cultural traditions, practices, and beliefs from around the world, her book is at once an exploration of the unknowable and a very humane journey through the land of grief.

The Voiding of Being

The Voiding of Being PDF Author: William Desmond
Publisher: Studies in Philosophy & the Hi
ISBN: 0813232481
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
"The author amplifies important themes in the unfolding of modern metaphysics, exploring diverse aspects of current skepticism and offering a defense in terms of his metaxological metaphysics. Along the way he engages both the long tradition and more modern writers, such as Heidegger and Marion"--

Between System and Poetics

Between System and Poetics PDF Author: Thomas Augustine Francis Kelly
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754652069
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
This is the first book-length examination of the work of an important contemporary thinker in the continental tradition, William Desmond. Desmond's thought is a new, post-modern way of articulating what he calls the 'between' which is human existence. Rooted in Plato and Augustine, and advancing through a confrontation with Hegel and Nietzsche, Desmond rejects facile scepticism and wins through to a strikingly original and powerfully searching articulation of the human. The present volume contains essays on Desmond's work both by emerging scholars and by well-established thinkers. It also contains a specially written essay on the practices of philosophy by Desmond himself.

The William Desmond Reader

The William Desmond Reader PDF Author: William Desmond
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438442912
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Career-spanning selections from the writings of William Desmond.

Being in America

Being in America PDF Author: Brian G Henning
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 940121073X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
Since its founding in 1950, the Metaphysical Society of America has remained a pluralistic community dedicated to rigorous philosophical inquiry into the most basic metaphysical questions. At each year’s conference, the presidential address offers original insights into metaphysical questions. Both the insights and the questions are as perennial as they are relevant to contemporary philosophers. This volume collects eighteen of the finest representatives from those presidential addresses, including contributions from George Allan, Richard Bernstein, Norris Clarke, Vincent Colapietro, Frederick Ferré, Jorge J. E. Gracia, Joseph Grange, Marjorie Grene, George Klubertanz, Ivor Leclerc, Ralph McInerny, Ernan McMullin, Joseph Owens, John Herman Randall, Jr., Nicholas Rescher, Stanley Rosen, John E. Smith, and Robert Sokolowski. Also included are Paul Weiss’s inaugural address to the Society, an introduction chronicling the history of the Society, and an original Foreword by William Desmond and Epilogue by Robert Neville.

Religion, Metaphysics, and the Postmodern

Religion, Metaphysics, and the Postmodern PDF Author: Christopher Ben Simpson
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1725237288
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
William Desmond's original and creative work in metaphysics is attracting more and more attention from philosophers of religion. Putting Desmond in conversation with John D. Caputo, an important philosopher of religion from the Continental tradition, Christopher Ben Simpson casts new light on Desmond's complex, multifaceted, and nuanced thought. The comparative approach allows Simpson to get at the core of recent debates in the philosophy of religion. He develops a rich understanding of how ethics and religion are informed by metaphysics, and contrasts this approach to the decidedly anti-metaphysical stance in Continental philosophy. Religion, Metaphysics, and the Postmodern presents a systematic analysis of Desmond's thought as it advances work on Caputo's thinking and on the philosophy of religion.

Transcendence, Immanence, and Intercultural Philosophy

Transcendence, Immanence, and Intercultural Philosophy PDF Author: Nahum Brown
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319430920
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
This book presents detailed discussions from leading intercultural philosophers, arguing for and against the priority of immanence in Chinese thought and the validity of Western interpretations that attempt to import conceptions of transcendence. The authors pay close attention to contemporary debates generated from critical analysis of transcendence and immanence, including discussions of apophasis, critical theory, post-secular conceptions of society, phenomenological approaches to transcendence, possible-world models, and questions of practice and application. This book aims to explore alternative conceptions of transcendence that either call the tradition in the West into question, or discover from within Western metaphysics a thoroughly dialectical way of thinking about immanence and transcendence.