Taking up the critique of theology found in the work of Heidegger, George Pattison argues for a model of thinking about God that would not be liable to the charge of "enframing" that Heidegger sees as characteristic of technological thinking. He constructs his case in relation to particular issues in bioethics, the place of theology in the university, the arts, and the contemporary experience of living in the city.

This text aims to guide the reader through the complexities of Heidegger's later works. The book offers an introduction to the main themes that preoccupied Heidegger in the second part of his career: technology; Art; the history of philosophy; and the exploration of a new post-technological way of thinking. The author explores many aspects of Heidegger's later life and work, including the massive controversy surrounding his Nazism, as well as his readings of Neitzsche, the Presocratics and Holderlin. He also assesses the difficult nature of Heidegger's thought and its significance for...

George Pattison provides a bold and innovative reassessment of Kierkegaard's neglected Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses and reading of his work as a whole. The first full length assessment of the discourses in English, this volume will be essential reading for philosophers and theologians, and anyone interested in Kierkegaard and the history of philosophy.

This collection brings together Western and Russian perspectives on the issues raised by the religious element in Dostoevsky's work. The essays cover such topics as temptation, his use of the gospels, the Russian tradition of the veneration of icons, as well as reading aloud, and dialogism. In addition to an exploration of the impact of the Christian tradition on Dostoevsky's major novels, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, there are also discussions of lesser known works such as The Landlady and A Little Boy at Christ's Christmas Tree

Although the ideas of Soren Kierkegaard played a pivotal role in shaping mainstream German philosophy and French existentialism, the question of how philosophers should read Kierkegaard is difficult. His intransigent religiosity has led some philosophers to view him essentially as a religious thinker with an anti-philosophical attitude. In a major new survey of Kierkegaard's thought, George Pattison addresses this question and shows that although it would be difficult to claim a "philosophy of Kierkegaard" as one can a philosophy of Kierkegaard" examines existence, anxiety, the good, and the...

This collection brings together Western and Russian perspectives on the issues raised by the religious element in Dostoevsky's work. The essays cover such topics as temptation, his use of the gospels, the Russian tradition of the veneration of icons, as well as reading aloud, and dialogism. In addition to an exploration of the impact of the Christian tradition on Dostoevsky's major novels, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, there are also discussions of lesser known works such as The Landlady and A Little Boy at Christ's Christmas Tree

Through a series of sharply focused studies, George Pattison examines Kierkegaard's religious thought--within the contextual framework of debates about religion, culture and society that were carried on in contemporary newspapers and journals read by the educated stratum of Danish society. Pattison not only considers Kierkegaard in relationship to high art and literature but to the Tivoli Gardens and the literary ephemera of his time. This has important implications for understanding Kierkegaard's view of the nature of religious communication in modern society.

Can theology still operate in the void of post-theism? In attempting to answer this question Agnosis examines the concept of the void itself, tracing a history of nothingness from Augustine through Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to Bataille and Derrida, and dialoguing with Japan's Kyoto School philosophers. It is argued that neither Augustinian nor post-Hegelian metaphysics have given a satisfactory understanding of nothingness and that we must look to an experience of nothingness as the best ground for future religious life and thought.

"By far the most profound thinker of the 19th century" --Ludwig Wittgenstein

"Kierkegaard's great contribution to Western philosophy was to assert, or to reassert with Romantic urgency, that, subjectively speaking, each existence is the center of the universe." --John Updike, The New Yorker

Harper Perennial Modern Classics presents the rediscovered spiritual writings of Soren Kierkegaard, edited and translated by Oxford theologian George Pattison. Called "the first modernist" by The Guardian and "the father of existentialism" by the New York Times,...

Western theology has long regarded 'Being' as a category pre-eminently applicable to God, the supreme Being who is also the source of all existence. This idea was challenged in the later philosophy of Martin Heidegger and identified with the position he called 'ontotheology'. Heidegger's critique was repeated and radicalized in so-called postmodern thought, to the point that many theologians and philosophers of religion now want to talk instead of God as 'beyond Being' or 'without Being'. Against this background, God and Being attempts to look again at why the ideas of God and Being got...