From Ecclesiastes to Simone Weil: Varieties of Philosophical Spirituality

by Ernest Rubinstein

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611477269
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	04/15/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	308
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Ernest Rubinstein is adjunct assistant professor of humanities at the New York University School of Continuing and Professional Studies.

Table of Contents

Contents


Acknowledgments

Preface

Chapter 1. Introduction: Philosophy as Religion
Chapter 2. Ecclesiastes
Chapter 3. Plato
Chapter 4. Lucretius and Marcus Aurelius
Chapter 5. Descartes
Chapter 6. Spinoza
Chapter 7. Kant
Chapter 8. Novalis
Chapter 9. Hegel: 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

Editorial Reviews

Dr. Rubenstein is obviously someone who has read exhaustively and pondered deeply on the fourteen authors (as well as their times and intellectual ‘neighbors’) he presents to us and savoured and deepened his grasp of the ‘flavor’, tendency, and tensions within each one; he offers us the benefit of his scholarship, flashes of insight, and scintillating powers of expression in mature, rounded and concentrated essays.... This is the work of a lifetime and an impressive, generous gift that will serve as a lasting monument to its author. It could well serve as a base textin a course on ‘Western Philosophy and the Sacred’, enticing each student to go perhaps more deeply than they initially intended into the thought of each thinker, grateful for the assistance and stimulated to make connections and cross-over comparisons of their own. This is the best kind of pedagogical device: richly informative, gracefully expressed and modestly self-effacing, provocative and fertilizing of the student’s own engagement with and further construction upon and beyond what they have been given. We are deeply in Dr. Rubenstein’s debt.... This book you will keep deep in your library; it is one of the last ones you will give away.

The Heythrop Journal

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.

Choice

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 spiritualityin 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.

Choice Reviews

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.

CHOICE