From Ecclesiastes to Simone Weil

Varieties of Philosophical Spirituality

By (author) Ernest Rubinstein

Not available to order

Publication date:

06 August 2014

Length of book:

308 pages

Publisher

Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

ISBN-13: 9781611477252

From Ecclesiastes to Simone Weil: Varieties of Philosophical Spirituality reads major philosophers from the Western philosophical canon and beyond for the spirituality implicit in their metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and logic. Ernest Rubinstein revives for the modern reader the spiritual import of philosophy as an area of inquiry and study. Spirituality is understood as a lived orientation towards the sacred. The sacred is characterized as the source of all being and human wellbeing. Philosophy is presented as an avenue of approach to the sacred alternative to the western religious traditions. Philosophers treated include Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Emerson, William James, Bertrand Russell, and Simone Weil.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Phenomenology of Spirit
Chapter 10. Kierkegaard
Chapter 11. Emerson
Chapter 12. William James
Chapter 13. Bertrand Russell
Chapter 14. Simone Weil
Chapter 15. Conclusion: Philosophical Sensibility as Philosophical Spirituality
Bibliography
About the Author

With a novel take on 14 philosophers, Rubinstein reintroduces a historical conception of philosophy as wrestling with the spiritual and thus becoming therapy, at least for the philosophers themselves. Recognizing that philosophy has, over the centuries, fractured into many quarreling silos of thought, this book attempts to find the common source of spirituality that philosophy has always had at its core. By defining spirituality in terms of 'a non-exclusive humanism,' Rubinstein is able to broaden the concept to include ontological or epistemological transcendence. This allows for inclusion of Bertrand Russell’s aesthetics, as well as the almost existential musings of the tacitly earthly Ecclesiastes. . . .Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.