Explains Cynicism's rise in popularity in the ancient world by exploring the set of attitudes that collectively formed the Greek praise of poverty.

William Desmond, taking issue with typical assessments of the ancient Cynics, contends that figures such as Antisthenes and Diogenes were not cultural outcasts or marginal voices in the classical culture of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. Rather, the Cynic movement had deep and significant roots in what Desmond calls "the Greek praise of poverty." Desmond demonstrates that classical attitudes toward wealth were complex and ambivalent, and allowed for an implicit praise of poverty and the virtues it could inspire. From an economic and political point of view, the poor majority at Athens...

Philosophy and its Others responds to the widespread sense that philosophy must renew its intellectual community with other significant ways of being and mind. The author articulates philosophy's community of mind with the aesthetic, the religious, and the ethical, without losing any of its own distinctive voice. He develops an original and constructive position between these extremes: the Hegelian extreme which reduces the plurality of others to a dialectical totality and the Wittgensteinian and deconstructive options that celebrate plurality, but without a proper sense of the connectedness...

As Plato told us long ago, the human being is neither a god nor a beast, but someone in between. Philosophy too is in between. How do we philosophize in between? W hat is the being of the between? This book answers the question in the most comprehensive terms possible. It offers an original understanding of metaphysical thinking and the fundamental senses of being, namely, the univocal, equivocal, dialectical, and metaxological senses.

Part I of Being and the Between focuses on the nature of metaphysics, the question of being, in terms of the above fourfold sense. Part II develops a...

In Ethics and the Between William Desmond addresses our current perplexities regarding the devaluation of being in modernity and the shadow of ethical nihilism. He rethinks the sources of value, the diverse ethical ways, the nature of ethical selving and communities, and articulates the necessity for a comprehensive reconstructive thinking about the meaning of being good, consonant with the response to the question of being in Being and the Between, the first book of a planned trilogy.

Seeking to renew an ancient companionship between the philosophical andthe religious, this book's meditative chapters dwell on certain elementalexperiences or happenings that keep the soul alive to the enigma of the divine.William Desmond engages the philosophical work of Pascal, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Shestov, and Soloviev, among others, and pursues with a philosophicalmindfulness what is most intimate in us, yet most universal: sleep, poverty, imagination, courage and witness, reverence, hatred and love, peace and war.Being religious has to do with that intimate universal, beyond...

An original work which rethinks the question of God in a constructive spirit, drawing its conclusions by considering ideas received from both philosophy and religion.

• Makes an important new contribution to the ongoing scholarly debates surrounding the intersection of philosophy and religion
  
• Suggests that this junction is not just dictated by religion having to prove its credentials to rational philosophy, but that it is also a matter of philosophy wondering if religion is the ultimate partner in dialogue
  
• Includes discussion of a...

An original work which rethinks the question of God in a constructive spirit, drawing its conclusions by considering ideas received from both philosophy and religion.

• Makes an important new contribution to the ongoing scholarly debates surrounding the intersection of philosophy and religion
  
• Suggests that this junction is not just dictated by religion having to prove its credentials to rational philosophy, but that it is also a matter of philosophy wondering if religion is the ultimate partner in dialogue
  
• Includes discussion of a...

This book contains the selected proceedings of a conference on Religion in German Idealism which took place in Nij- gen (Netherlands) in January 2000. The conference was - ganized by the Centre of German Idealism, which co-or- nates the research on classical German philosophy in the Netherlands and in Belgium. Generous support of the Dutch Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) has made this conference possible. A few months after the conference Ludwig died, and this circumstance unexpectedly delayed efforts to bring the proceedings of the conference to p- lished form. We are now happy to...

Seeking to renew an ancient companionship between the philosophical andthe religious, this book's meditative chapters dwell on certain elementalexperiences or happenings that keep the soul alive to the enigma of the divine.William Desmond engages the philosophical work of Pascal, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Shestov, and Soloviev, among others, and pursues with a philosophicalmindfulness what is most intimate in us, yet most universal: sleep, poverty, imagination, courage and witness, reverence, hatred and love, peace and war.Being religious has to do with that intimate universal, beyond...