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This collection provides the first in-depth introduction to the theory of the religious imagination put forward by renowned philosopher Douglas Hedley, from his earliest essays to his principal writings. Featuring Hedley's inaugural lecture delivered at Cambridge University in 2018, the book sheds light on his robust concept of religious imagination as the chief power of the soul's knowledge of the Divine and reveals its importance in contemporary metaphysics, ethics and politics. Chapters trace the development of the religious imagination in Christian Platonism from Late Antiquity to British Romanticism, drawing on Origen, Henry More and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, before providing a survey of...
How one of the world's most important religions, Christianity, shaped one of the important issues of our time, the environment.
This book illustrates the vitality and diversity of the seventeenth-century philosophers now known as the “Cambridge Platonists”, focusing chiefly on Henry More, Ralph Cudworth and two women associated with the group — Anne Conway and Damaris Masham. The “Cambridge Platonists” made significant contributions to early modern philosophy. Their Platonist sobriquet obscures the fact that they were at the forefront of new thinking of their day.Some of the first English philosophers to write in the vernacular, they tackled the big themes of seventeenth-century philosophy (materialism, determinism, scepticism, atheism) and contributed original and innovative ideas in metaphysics, epistemology, psychology, and ethics. This volume highlights their treatment of some key philosophical themes (from the infinity of the world and the concept of substance to consciousness animals, love), and their inter-connections with contemporary philosophers (Descartes, Leibniz, and Locke). This book will be a valuable resource for academics, researchers, and Philosophy graduates. The chapters in this book were originally published in the British Journal for the History of Philosophy.
Often neglected by historians today, the seventeenth-century philosophers known as the Cambridge Platonists were recognised in their time as some of the most influential and controversial philosophers in England. Whereas most studies of the Cambridge Platonists have discussed their later careers, this book focuses on their early, formative years at Cambridge during the English Civil Wars. Samuel M. Kaldas explores how the Cambridge Platonists addressed issues central to philosophy of religion as we know it today through their engagement with early seventeenth-century religious controversies about predestination, the character and nature of God, and the role of reason in religion. His study serves as an accessible introduction to both the Cambridge Platonists, and to English religious controversies that contributed to the birth of the modern philosophy of religion. At the same time, Kaldas provides context for and fresh insights into the Cambridge Platonists' intellectual development and the coherence of their thought.
Is there a language of transcendence which does not fall under the well-worn categories of monism, theism, pantheism, biblical or pagan monotheism, personal or tripersonal God, or an impersonal absolute, conceived as immanent and/or transcendent? The present set of studies from different fields of research centers on the question whether it is possible to speak at all of transcendence or a divinity, and if it is, under what limitations does such speech proceed. In current discussion in theology and in philosophy of religion, there is a pervasive awareness that the inherited terms and alternatives, developed in the western tradition, no longer facilitate an adequate understanding of the divin...
This volume critically re-evaluates the received interpretation of the nature of light in the ancient sources. Isidoros C. Katsos contests the prevalent view in the history of optics according to which pre-modernity theorized light as subordinate to sight ('oculocentrism') by examining in depth the contrary textual evidence found in early Christian texts. It shows that, from Philo of Alexandria and Origen to Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa, the Jewish-Christian commentary tradition on the hexaemeral literature (the biblical creation narrative) reflected deeply on the nature and physicality of light for the purposes of understanding the structure and purpose of material creation. Conte...
Samuel M. Kaldas' study explores the development and influence of the early modern philosophers known as the Cambridge Platonists.
This interrogation of Origen's legacy for the 21st Century returns to old questions built upon each other over eighteen centuries of Origen scholarship-problems of translation and transmission, positioning Origen in the histories of philosophy, theology, and orthodoxy, and defining his philological and exegetical programmes. The essays probe the more reliable sources for Origen's thought by those who received his legacy and built on it. They focus on understanding how Origen's legacy was adopted, transformed and transmitted looking at key figures from the fourth century through the Reformation. A section on modern contributions to the understanding of Origen embraces the foundational contrib...
In the minds of some, universal salvation is a heretical idea that was imported into Christianity from pagan philosophies by Origen (c.185-253/4). Ilaria Ramelli argues that this picture is completely mistaken. She maintains that Christian theologians were the first people to proclaim that all will be saved and that their reasons for doing so were rooted in their faith in Christ. She demonstrates that, in fact, the idea of the final restoration of all creation (apokatastasis) was grounded upon the teachings of the Bible and the church's beliefs about Jesus' total triumph over sin, death, and evil through his incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension. Ramelli traces the Christian ...
Henry More had an odd idea. Thinking about space, he realized it was invisible, for we see things in space but not space itself. It’s also immaterial, for matter exists in space but space is not itself material—try to grab it and it slips through your fingers. Space was also infinite and transcendent yet nonetheless omnipresent, for we cannot go anywhere except in and through space. But this was exactly how More saw God; God is invisible, immaterial, infinite, and transcendent, yet also omnipresent above, beyond, and within us. If God was somehow linked to space, he could be truly present while remaining immaterial, upholding the creator-creature distinction. He’d be near to us but wou...