This book offers a new perspective on the philosopher, psychologist, and religious thinker William James. Using biographical materials, manuscripts, and analysis, the author develops the first systematic reading of James' world-view of radical empiricism, which sought to take concrete, immediate experience as the basis for understanding the world. The book offers close readings of key works by James. Lamberth argues that religion and philosophy themselves are intimately related conceptually for James; and concludes by relating James' conceptions to present debates concerning truth, religious...

This book provides a distinctive account of Edward Said's critique of modern culture by highlighting the religion-secularism distinction on which it is predicated. It refers to religious and secular traditions and to tropes that extend the meaning and reference of religion and secularism in indeterminate ways. It covers Said's heterogeneous corpus--from Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, his first book, to Orientalism, his most influential book, to his recent writings on the Palestinian question. The religion-secularism distinction lies behind Said's cultural criticism, and his...

This book provides a distinctive account of Edward Said's critique of modern culture by highlighting the religion-secularism distinction on which it is predicated. It refers to religious and secular traditions and to tropes that extend the meaning and reference of religion and secularism in indeterminate ways. It covers Said's heterogeneous corpus--from Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, his first book, to Orientalism, his most influential book, to his recent writings on the Palestinian question. The religion-secularism distinction lies behind Said's cultural criticism, and his...

This major study of Kierkegaard and love explores Kierkegaard's description of love's treachery, difficulty, and hope. It reads his Works of Love as a text that both deciphers and complicates the central books in his pseudonymous canon: Fear and Trembling, Repetition, Either/Or and Stages on Life's Way. Amy Laura Hall argues that a spiritual void brings each text into being, and her interpretation is as much about faith as about love. Her scholarly and lyrical style makes this study a poetic contribution to ethics and the philosophy of religion.

Few concepts are more central to ethics than love, but none is more subject to varying interpretation. This book explores several theological, philosophical, and literary accounts of love, focusing on how it relates to matters such as freedom and duty. Timothy Jackson also examines two concepts that are fundamental to Biblical ethical discourse--abomination and liberation--and relates these extremes to love, freedom and duty. Throughout this book he defends the moral priority of a distinctive type of love ("agape"), and argues for a realistic ethic of love.

Bowlin argues that the strength of Aquinas' moral theology is his assumption about our common lot: the good we desire is difficult to know and to will, particularly because of contingencies of various kinds--within ourselves, in the ends and objects we pursue, and in the circumstances of choice. Since contingencies are fortune's effects, Aquinas insists that fortune makes good choice difficult. Bowlin explores Aquinas' treatment of virtue, agency, and happiness in this context, and places him more precisely in the history of ethics, among Aristotle, Augustine, and the Stoics.