Mortal Subjects

Mortal Subjects PDF Author: Christina Howells
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 0745652751
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Get Book Here

Book Description
This wide ranging and challenging book explores the relationship between subjectivity and mortality as it is understood by a number of twentieth-century French philosophers including Sartre, Lacan, Levinas and Derrida. Making intricate and sometimes unexpected connections, Christina Howells draws together the work of prominent thinkers from the fields of phenomenology and existentialism, religious thought, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction, focussing in particular on the relations between body and soul, love and death, desire and passion. From Aristotle through to contemporary analytic philosophy and neuroscience the relationship between mind and body (psyche and soma, consciousness and brain) has been persistently recalcitrant to analysis, and emotion (or passion) is the locus where the explanatory gap is most keenly identified. This problematic forms the broad backdrop to the work’s primary focus on contemporary French philosophy and its attempts to understand the intimate relationship between subjectivity and mortality, in the light not only of the ‘death’ of the classical subject but also of the very real frailty of the subject as it lives on, finite, desiring, embodied, open to alterity and always incomplete. Ultimately Howells identifies this vulnerability and finitude as the paradoxical strength of the mortal subject and as what permits its transcendence. Subtle, beautifully written, and cogently argued, this book will be invaluable for students and scholars interested in contemporary theories of subjectivity, as well as for readers intrigued by the perennial connections between love and death.

Mortal Subjects

Mortal Subjects PDF Author: Christina Howells
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 0745652751
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Get Book Here

Book Description
This wide ranging and challenging book explores the relationship between subjectivity and mortality as it is understood by a number of twentieth-century French philosophers including Sartre, Lacan, Levinas and Derrida. Making intricate and sometimes unexpected connections, Christina Howells draws together the work of prominent thinkers from the fields of phenomenology and existentialism, religious thought, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction, focussing in particular on the relations between body and soul, love and death, desire and passion. From Aristotle through to contemporary analytic philosophy and neuroscience the relationship between mind and body (psyche and soma, consciousness and brain) has been persistently recalcitrant to analysis, and emotion (or passion) is the locus where the explanatory gap is most keenly identified. This problematic forms the broad backdrop to the work’s primary focus on contemporary French philosophy and its attempts to understand the intimate relationship between subjectivity and mortality, in the light not only of the ‘death’ of the classical subject but also of the very real frailty of the subject as it lives on, finite, desiring, embodied, open to alterity and always incomplete. Ultimately Howells identifies this vulnerability and finitude as the paradoxical strength of the mortal subject and as what permits its transcendence. Subtle, beautifully written, and cogently argued, this book will be invaluable for students and scholars interested in contemporary theories of subjectivity, as well as for readers intrigued by the perennial connections between love and death.

The Urantia Papers

The Urantia Papers PDF Author: Unknown
Publisher: tredition
ISBN: 3347631226
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 3323

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Urantia Papers - Unknown - The Urantia Papers is a spiritual and philosophical book that originated in Chicago sometime between 1924 and 1955. The authorship remains a matter of speculation. The authors introduce the word Urantia as the name of the planet Earth and state that their intent is to present enlarged concepts and advanced truth. The book aims to unite religion, science and philosophy, and its enormous amount of material about science is unique among literature claimed to be presented by celestial beings. Among other topics, the book discusses the origin and meaning of life, mankind's place in the universe, the relationship between God and people, and the life of Jesus. It has been described as a rich and complex moral narrative, equal parts Tolkien and St. Paul.

The Knotted Subject

The Knotted Subject PDF Author: Elisabeth Bronfen
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400864739
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 489

Get Book Here

Book Description
Surrealist writer André Breton praised hysteria for being the greatest poetic discovery of the nineteenth century, but many physicians have since viewed it as the "wastebasket of medicine," a psychosomatic state that defies attempts at definition and cure and that can be easily mistaken for other pathological conditions. In light of a resurgence of critical interest in hysteria, leading feminist scholar Elisabeth Bronfen reinvestigates medical writings and cultural performance to reveal the continued relevance of a disorder widely thought to be a romantic formulation of the past. Through a critical rereading, she develops a new concept of hysteria, one that challenges traditional gender-based theories linking it to dissatisfied feminine sexual desire. Bronfen turns instead to hysteria's traumatic causes, particularly the fear of violation, and shows how the conversion of psychic anguish into somatic symptoms can be interpreted today as the enactment of personal and cultural discontent. Tracing the development of cultural formations of hysteria from the 1800s to the present, this book explores the writings of Freud, Charcot, and Janet together with fictional texts (Radcliffe, Stoker, Anne Sexton), opera (Mozart, Wagner), cinema (Cronenberg, Hitchcock, Woody Allen), and visual art (Marie-Ange Guilleminot, Cindy Sherman). Each of these creative works attests to a particular relationship between hysteria and self-fashioning, and enables us to read hysteria quite literally as a language of discontent. The message broadcasted by the hysteric is one of vulnerability: vulnerability of the symbolic, of identity, and of the human body itself. Throughout this work, Bronfen not only offers fresh approaches to understanding hysteria in our culture, but also introduces a new metaphor to serve as a theoretical tool. Whereas the phallus has long dominated psychoanalytical discourse, the image of the navel--a knotted originary wound common to both genders--facilitates discussion of topics relevant to hysteria, such as trauma, mortality, and infinity. Bronfen's insights make for a lively, innovative work sure to interest readers across the fields of art and literature, feminism, and psychology. Originally published in 1998. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Lyric Orientations

Lyric Orientations PDF Author: Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501701053
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Lyric Orientations, Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge explores the power of lyric poetry to stir the social and emotional lives of human beings in the face of the ineffable nature of our mortality. She focuses on two German-speaking masters of lyric prose and poetry: Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) and Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926). While Hölderlin and Rilke are stylistically very different, each believes in the power of poetic language to orient us as social beings in contexts that otherwise can be alienating. They likewise share the conviction that such alienation cannot be overcome once and for all in any universal event. Both argue that to deny the uncertainty created by the absence of any such event (or to deny the alienation itself) is likewise to deny the particularly human condition of uncertainty and mortality. By drawing on the work of Stanley Cavell, who explores how language in all its formal aspects actually enables us to engage meaningfully with the world, Eldridge challenges poststructuralist scholarship, which stresses the limitations—even the failure—of language in the face of reality. Eldridge provides detailed readings of Hölderlin and Rilke and positions them in a broader narrative of modernity that helps make sense of their difficult and occasionally contradictory self-characterizations. Her account of the orienting and engaging capabilities of language reconciles the extraordinarily ambitious claims that Hölderlin and Rilke make for poetry—that it can create political communities, that it can change how humans relate to death, and that it can unite the sensual and intellectual components of human subjectivity—and the often difficult, fragmented, or hermetic nature of their individual poems.

The Urantia Book

The Urantia Book PDF Author:
Publisher: Urantia Book Fellowship
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 1812

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Black Mirror

The Black Mirror PDF Author: Lucius Grey
Publisher: ShieldCrest
ISBN: 1907629785
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 381

Get Book Here

Book Description
In a time of war and uncertainty, a young woman is evacuated from her home in London to live with an estranged relative in the countryside. The crumbling estate of her eccentric father holds a secret that has been hidden from the greedy eyes of those seeking powers beyond mortal comprehension. Only a true blood relative of Lord Knightsbridge can gain access to a secret chamber and activate an ancient artefact of great power. Cassandra soon discovers a sinister plot by Nazi sympathisers that could turn the tide of the war against the allies. However, nothing is truly as it seems.

The Urantia Book

The Urantia Book PDF Author: Urantia Foundation
Publisher: Urantia Foundation
ISBN: 0911560513
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 2165

Get Book Here

Book Description
Written in the form of a revelation from divine beings, the classic guide to expanding consciousness presents texts discussing God, the universe, angels and other beings, the history of the world, the development of civilization, personal spiritual growth, and the life and teachings of Jesus.

The Rod, the Root and the Flower

The Rod, the Root and the Flower PDF Author: Coventry Patmore
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1365009572
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 94

Get Book Here

Book Description
In similar fashion, as Bernard of Clairvaux, and many others after, Patmore's mantra: "I only report the cry which certain 'babes in Christ' have uttered: 'Taste and see that the Lord is sweet'." More importantly, he adds, far be it from me to pose as other than a mere reporter, using the poetic intellect and imagination so as in part to conceive those happy realities of life which in many have been and are an actual and abiding possession; and to express them in such manner that thousands who lead beautiful and substantially Christian lives, whether outside or within the visible Church, being ssisted in the only true learning, which is to know better what they know. I make no ridiculous pretence of invading the province of a theologian by dogma. This I am content with implicitly; my work being mainly that of the Poet, bent only upon discovering and reporting how the "loving hint" of doctrine has "met the longing guess" of the souls of those who have so believed in the Unseen that it has become visible.

The Death of Socrates and the Life of Philosophy

The Death of Socrates and the Life of Philosophy PDF Author: Peter J. Ahrensdorf
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791426333
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Get Book Here

Book Description
Shows that the dialogue in Plato's Phaedo is primarily devoted to presenting Socrates' final defense of the philosophical life against the theoretical and political challenge of religion.

Body and Soul

Body and Soul PDF Author: Jennifer Whiting
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197666000
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 329

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Essays on Aristotle's "hylomorphism" - i.e., his conception of an organism's body as standing to its soul as matter (hulê) to form (morphê). Common readings - that there is only one form per species and that matter is what distinguishes individuals within a species from one another - are rejected in favor of the view that each member of a biological species has its own numerically distinct form. Original grounds are given for Aristotle's conception of soul as "the form and essence" of an organic body: he thinks it needed to account for the distinction between generation and destruction simpliciter and the mere alteration of existing stuff. The compatibility of this with Aristotle's conception of matter as the substratum of coming-to-be and passing-away is defended by appeal to a distinction between functionally defined organic parts (such as eyes) and the elements that constitute them. An original reading of the perceiving part of soul as one with the desiring part is given and asymmetries afforded by Aristotle's teleology explored. "Normative" cases (where formal explanations dominate) are contrasted with "defective" ones (where matter is incompletely "mastered" by form), with special attention to akratic subjects: their desires are not fully mastered by practical reason, which stands in normative cases as form to matter. The role played by Aristotle's conception of soul in his account of rational agency is employed against the dogma that he lacked the allegedly "modern" conception of "self" found in Locke and an original reading of Locke's account of personal identity is developed"--