Selfless Love and Human Flourishing in Paul Tillich and Iris Murdoch PDF Download

Author: Julia Theresa Meszaros
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019876586X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Revision of author's thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oxford, 2012 under title: Selfless love and human flourishing: a theological and a secular perspective in dialogue.

Author: Julia T. Meszaros
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191078360
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
In an age of self-affirmation and self-assertion, 'selfless love' can appear as a threat to the lover's personal well-being. This perception jars with the Biblical promise that we gain our life through losing it and therefore calls for a theological response. In conversation with the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich and the atheistic moral philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, Selfless Love and Human Flourishing in Paul Tillich and Iris Murdoch enquires into the anthropological grounds on which selfless love can be said to build up, rather than undermine, the lover's self. It proposes that while the implausibility of selfless love was furthered by the modern deconstruction of the self, both Tillich and Murdoch utilize this very deconstruction towards explicating and restoring the link between selfless love and human flourishing. Julia T. Meszaros shows that they use the modern diagnosis of the human being's lack of a stable and independent self as manifest in Sartre's existentialism in support of an understanding of the self as relational and fallen. This leads them to view a loving orientation away from self and a surrender to the other as critical to the full flourishing of human selfhood. In arguing that Tillich and Murdoch defend the link between selfless love and human flourishing through reference to the human being's ontological selflessness, Meszaros closely engages Søren Kierkegaard's earlier attempt to keep selfless love and human flourishing in a productive, dialectical tension. She also examines the breakdown of this tension in the later figures of Anders Nygren, Simone Weil, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and addresses the pitfalls of this breakdown. Her examination concludes by arguing that the link between selfless love and human flourishing would be strengthened by a more resolute endorsement of a personal God, and of the reciprocal nature of selfless love.

Author: Deborah Casewell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000385078
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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This book interrogates the contemporary Lutheran theologian Eberhard Jüngel’s theological anthropology, arguing that Jüngel’s thought can provide a model for theological engagement with philosophical accounts of existence. Focusing on Jüngel’s theology of existence, the author explores the thought of philosophers, including Heidegger and Hegel, their influence on and application to his theology, and argues that Jüngel’s account of humanity should be seen as a response to atheistic existentialist accounts of existence. In showing how Jüngel’s theology is informed by and dependent on philosophical thought, this book provides a new lens on the interplay between philosophy, theology, and religion in twentieth-century German thought. It will be of particular interest to researchers in philosophy, theology, and philosophy of religion.

Author: Paul S. Fiddes
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0567703371
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
The 'others' examined by Fiddes are mainly those with whom Murdoch entered into explicit dialogue in her novels and philosophical writing - including Immanuel Kant, Simone Weil, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rudolph Bultmann, Paul Tillich, Don Cupitt, Donald Mackinnon and Jacques Derrida. This 'historic' dialogue is, however, placed within a wider dialogue between literature and theology being conducted by the author, and 'others' are brought into relation with Murdoch in order to illuminate this more extensive conversation - notably the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and the feminist philosopher Julia Kristeva. The book demonstrates that characteristic themes in Murdoch's novels and philosophy - the love of the Good, the death of the ego, illusory consolations, the death of God, the modifying of the will by 'waiting', the sublime and the beautiful, and attention to other things and persons - all take on a greater meaning when placed in the context of her life-long conversation with theology. The exploration of this context is deepened in this volume by reference to annotations and notes that Murdoch made in a number of theological books in her personal library.

Author: Bolton Lucy Bolton
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474416411
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
Iris Murdoch was not only one of post-war Britain's most celebrated and prolific novelists - she was also an influential philosopher, whose work was concerned with the question of the good and how we can see our moral worlds more clearly. Murdoch believed that paying attention to art is a way for us to become less self-centred, and this book argues that cinema is the perfect form of art to enable us to do this. Bringing together Murdoch's moral philosophy and contemporary cinema to build a dialogue about vision, ethics and love, author Lucy Bolton encourages us to view cinema as a way of studying other worlds and moral journeys, and to reflect upon their ethical significance in the world of the film and in our daily lives.

Author: Silvia Caprioglio Panizza
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000595927
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
This book draws on Iris Murdoch’s philosophy to explore questions related to the importance of attention in ethics. In doing so, it also engages with Murdoch’s ideas about the existence of a moral reality, the importance of love, and the necessity but also the difficulty, for most of us, of fighting against our natural self-centred tendencies. Why is attention important to morality? This book argues that many moral failures and moral achievements can be explained by attention. Not only our actions and choices, but the possibilities we choose among, and even the meaning of what we perceive, are to a large extent determined by whether we pay attention, and what we attend to. In this way, the book argues that attention is fundamental, though often overlooked, in morality. While the book’s discussion of attention revolves primarily around Murdoch’s thought, it also engages significantly with Simone Weil, who introduced the concept of attention in a spiritual context. The book also engages with contemporary debates concerning moral perception and motivation, empirical psychology, animal ethics, and Buddhist philosophy. The Ethics of Attention will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working on Iris Murdoch, Simone Weil, ethics and moral psychology, and the philosophy of attention.

Author: Silvia Caprioglio Panizza
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000592626
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 783

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Book Description
Iris Murdoch was a philosopher and novelist of extraordinary breadth and originality whose work defies simple categorisation. Her philosophical writing engages with an astonishingly wide range of figures, from Plato and Kant to Sartre and Heidegger, and her work increasingly inspires debate in ethics, aesthetics, religion, and literature. The Murdochian Mind is an outstanding reference source to the full span of Murdoch's philosophical work, comprising 37 specially commissioned chapters written by an international team of leading scholars. Divided into five clear parts, the volume covers the following areas: A guide to Murdoch's key philosophical texts, including The Sovereignty of Good and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. Core themes and concepts in Murdoch's philosophy, such as love, moral vision, and attention. Murdoch's engagement with the history of philosophy, including Plato, Kant, Hegel, Simone Weil, and Wittgenstein. Interdisciplinary connections with art, literature, and religion, including Judaism, Buddhism, and Christianity. Murdoch and contemporary philosophical debates, including feminism, virtue ethics, and metaethics. The application of Murdoch’s thought to applied ethics, including animal ethics, psychiatric ethics, and the environment. Although recent years have seen a blossoming of interest in Murdoch’s philosophy, The Murdochian Mind is the first volume to do justice to the incredibly rich and wide-ranging nature of her work. As such it will be of great interest to students of philosophy, especially ethics and aesthetics, as well as those in related disciplines such as literature, religion, and gender studies.

Author: Gerard J. Ryan
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031060075
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
In this book, Gerard J. Ryan examines the interrelationship between recognition theory and theology with their respective concerns for what it means to be a human. He advocates a mutual accompaniment that reformulates recognition theory within a practical and public theology. Ryan develops this interpersonal recognition through the accompaniment of vulnerable people, particularly persons with disabilities and those who suffer from mental illness. He explores three contexts that support this mutual accompaniment and the labour of recognition. These are narrativity, the stories we live out of; vulnerability, the basic human condition common to all; and participation, the inter-relationship of humanity.

Author: Kate Kirkpatrick
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 056766452X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the twentieth century's most prominent atheists. But his philosophy was informed by theological writers and themes in ways that have not previously been acknowledged. In Sartre and Theology, Kirkpatrick examines Sartre's philosophical formation and rarely discussed early work, demonstrating how, and which, theology shaped Sartre's thinking. She also shows that Sartre's philosophy - especially Being and Nothingness and Existentialism is A Humanism - contributed to several prominent twentieth-century theologies, examining Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and Liberation theologians rebuttals and appropriations of Sartre. For philosophers, this work opens up an unmined vein of influence on Sartre's work which illuminates his conceptual divergences from the German phenomenological tradition. And for theologians, it offers insights into a theologically informed atheism which provoked responses from some of the twentieth-century's greatest theologians - an atheism from which we can still learn much today.

Author: Zachary Purvis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191086150
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Theology and the University in Nineteenth-Century Germany examines the dual transformation of institutions and ideas that led to the emergence of theology as science, the paradigmatic project of modern theology associated with Friedrich Schleiermacher. Beginning with earlier educational reforms across central Europe and especially following the upheavals of the Napoleonic period, an impressive list of provocateurs, iconoclasts, and guardians of the old faith all confronted the nature of the university, the organization of knowledge, and the unity of theology's various parts, quandaries which together bore the collective name of 'theological encyclopedia'. Schleiermacher's remarkably influential programme pioneered the structure and content of the theological curriculum and laid the groundwork for theology's historicization. Zachary Purvis offers a comprehensive investigation of Schleiermacher's programme through the era's two predominant schools: speculative theology and mediating theology. Purvis highlights that the endeavour ultimately collapsed in the context of Wilhelmine Germany and the Weimar Republic, beset by the rise of religious studies, radical disciplinary specialization, a crisis of historicism, and the attacks of dialectical theology. In short, the project represented university theology par excellence. Engaging in detail with these developments, Purvis weaves the story of modern university theology into the broader tapestry of German and European intellectual culture, with periodic comparisons to other national contexts. In doing so, he Purvis presents a substantially new way to understand the relationship between theology and the university, both in nineteenth-century Germany and, indeed, beyond.