You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
A collection of essays in which philosophers of widely different interests grapple with the problem of the relative and the absolute in philosophy and religion. A concluding article tries to advance beyond the simple antithesis to a more sophisticated and adequite conception.
"We vote Key ideas the year's best browse". -- Newsweek Key Ideas in Human Thought explains 2,500 of the most important terms and concepts that have shaped the modern world. Encompassing all fields of inquiry from science to history, this rich compendium is a valuable tool for anyone.
In 'Stalin is Dead, ' Shihor offers a medley of aphorisms, flash fiction, and short stories, carving out a slice of the world in which Kafka would feel at home. The characters that inhabit this world - reckless she-goats, morose fish, somnambulistic theologians, poignant old ladies, dying dictators, and dead poets, to name just a few - have nothing in common save for the fact that they instruct us on the human condition. These edifying stories, with all their sadness and humor, are a writer's tour de force and a reader's delight.
This book offers a new interpretation of the relationship between 'insight practice' (satipatthana) and the attainment of the four jhànas (i.e., right samàdhi), a key problem in the study of Buddhist meditation. The author challenges the traditional Buddhist understanding of the four jhànas as states of absorption, and shows how these states are the actualization and embodiment of insight (vipassanà). It proposes that the four jhànas and what we call 'vipassanà' are integral dimensions of a single process that leads to awakening. Current literature on the phenomenology of the four jhànas and their relationship with the 'practice of insight' has mostly repeated traditional Theravàda i...
Places the controversy initiated by the Tibetan Tsong kha pa - who elaborated on one of the eight difficult points in understanding Madhyamaka philosophy - in its Indian and Tibetan context.
This book provides a philosophical account of the major doctrinal shift in the history of early Theravada tradition in India: the transition from the earliest stratum of Buddhist thought to the systematic of the Pali Abhidhamma movement.
In this book, Shlomo Biderman examines the views, outlooks, and attitudes of two distinct cultures: the West and classical India. He turns to a rich and varied collection of primary sources: the Rg Veda, the Upanishads, and texts by the Buddhist philosophers Någårjuna and Vasubandhu, among others. In studying the West, Biderman considers the Bible and its commentaries, the writings of such philosophers as Plato, Descartes, Berkeley, Kant, and Derrida, and the literature of Kafka, Melville, and Orwell. Additional sources are Mozart's Don Giovanni and seminal films like Ingmar Bergman's Persona. Biderman uses concrete examples from religion and literature to illustrate the formal aspects of ...
Several thousand years ago Indo-European culture diverged into two ways of thinking; one went West, the other East. Tracing their differences, Christopher Bollas examines how these mentalities are now converging once again, notably in the practice of psychoanalysis. Creating a freely associated comparison between western psychoanalysts and eastern philosophers, Bollas demonstrates how the Eastern use of poetry evolved as a collective way to house the individual self. On one hand he links this tradition to the psychoanalytic praxes of Winnicott and Khan, which he relates to Daoism in their privileging of solitude and non verbal forms of communicating. On the other, Bollas examines how Jung, Bion and Rosenfeld, assimilate the Confucian ethic that sees the individual and group mind as a collective, while Freudian psychoanalysis he argues has provided an unconscious meeting place of both viewpoints. Bollas’s intriguing book will be of interest to psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, Orientalists, and those concerned with cultural studies.
The popular Hindi film industry is the largest in India and the most conspicuous film industry in the non-Western world. This book analyses the pivotal visual and narrative conventions employed in popular Hindi films through the combined prism of film studies and classical Indian philosophy and ritualism. The book shows the films outside Western paradigms, as visual manifestations and outcomes of the evolution of classical Hindu notions and esthetic forms. These include notions associated with the Advaita-Vedānta philosophical school and early Buddhist thought, concepts and dynamism stemming from Hindu ritualism, rasa esthetic theories, as well as Brahmanic notions such as dharma (religion,...
In this unprecedented guide to the Vedas, Frits Staal, the celebrated author of Agni- The Vedic Ritual of the Fire Altarand Universals- Studies in Indian Logic and Linguisticsexamines almost every aspect of these ancient sources of Indic civilisation. Staal extracts concrete information from the Oral Tradition and Archaeology about Vedic people and their language, what they thought and did, and where they went and when. He provides essential information about the Vedas and includes selections and translations. Staal sheds light on mantras and rituals, that contributed to what came to be known as Hinduism. Significant is a modern analysis of what we can learn from the Vedas today- the origina...