The Qur'an contains many miracle stories, from Moses's staff turning into a serpent to Mary's conceiving Jesus as a virgin. In Understanding the Qur'anic Miracle Stories in the Modern Age, Isra Yazicioglu offers a glimpse of the ways in which meaningful implications have been drawn from these apparently strange narratives, both in the premodern and modern era. It fleshes out a fascinating medieval Muslim debate over miracles and connects its insights with early and late modern turning points in Western thought and with contemporary Qur'anic interpretation. Building on an apparent tension within the Qur'an and analyzing crucial cases of classical and modern Muslim engagement with these miracle stories, this book illustrates how an apparent site of conflict between faith and reason, or revelation and science, can become a site of fruitful exchange.

This book is a distinctive contribution to a new trend in Qur'anic Studies: it reveals the presence of insightful Qur'anic interpretation outside of the traditional line-by-line commentary genre, engaging with the works of Ghazali, Ibn Rushd, and Said Nursi. Moreover, focused as it is on the case of miracle stories, the book also goes beyond these specific passages to reflect more broadly on the issue of Qur'anic hermeneutics. It notes the connections between literal and symbolic approaches and highlights the importance of approaching the Qur'an with an eye to its potential implications for everyday life.

Dalmatian-Austrian philosopher, Roman Catholic priest, and radical cultural critic Ivan Illich is best known for polemical writings such as Deschooling Society and Tools for Conviviality, which decried Western institutions of the 1970s. This collection brings together Illich's shorter writings from his early publications through the rise of his remarkable intellectual career, making available works that had fallen into undue obscurity. A fervent critic of Western Catholicism, Illich also addressed contemporary practices in fields from education and medicine to labor and socioeconomic development. At the heart of his work is his opposition to the imperialistic nature of state- and Church-sponsored missionary activities. His deep understanding of Church history, particularly the institutions of the thirteenth century, lent a historian's perspective to his critique of the Church and other twentieth-century institutions. The Powerless Church and Other Selected Writings, 1955-1985 comprises some of Illich's most salient and influential short works as well as a foreword by philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Featuring writings that had previously appeared in now-defunct publications, this volume is an indispensable resource for readers of Illich's longer works and for scholars of philosophy, religion, and cultural critique.

David Hume is traditionally seen as a devastating critic of religion. He is widely read as an infidel, a critic of the Christian faith, and an attacker of popular forms of worship. His reputation as irreligious is well forged among his readers, and his argument against miracles sits at the heart of the narrative overview of his work that perennially indoctrinates thousands of first-year philosophy students. In Toward a Humean True Religion, Andre Willis succeeds in complicating Hume's split approach to religion, showing that Hume was not, in fact, dogmatically against religion in all times and places. Hume occupied a "watershed moment," Willis contends, when old ideas of religion were being replaced by the modern idea of religion as a set of epistemically true but speculative claims. Thus, Willis repositions the relative weight of Hume's antireligious sentiment, giving significance to the role of both historical and discursive forces instead of simply relying on Hume's personal animus as its driving force. Willis muses about what a Humean "true religion" might look like and suggests that we think of this as a third way between the classical and modern notions of religion. He argues that the cumulative achievements of Hume's mild philosophic theism, the aim of his moral rationalism, and the conclusion of his project on the passions provide the best content for this "true religion."

This book offers a new reading of Jonathan Edwards’s virtue ethic that examines a range of qualities Edwards identifies as “virtues� and considers their importance for contemporary ethics. Each of Edwards’s human virtues is “receptive� in nature: humans acquire the virtues through receiving divine grace, and therefore depend utterly on Edwards’s God for virtue’s acquisition. By contending that humans remain authentic moral agents even as they are unable to attain virtue apart from his God’s assistance, Edwards challenges contemporary conceptions of moral responsibility, which tend to emphasize human autonomy as a central part of accountability.

The essays in Religious Upbringing and the Costs of Freedom are the personal stories of philosophers who were brought up religiously and have broken free, in one way or another, from restraint and oppression. As trained philosophers, they are well equipped to reflect on and analyze their experiences. In this book, they offer not only stories of stress and liberation but ruminations on the moral issues that arise when parents and other caregivers, in seeking to do good by their children, sometimes end up doing real harm to their personal development and sense of autonomy as individuals.

In addition to the editors, the contributors are Raymond D. Bradley, Damien Alexander DuPont, Diane Enns, Paul H. Hirst, Amalia Jiva, Irfan Khawaja, Christine Overall, Tasia R. Persson, and Glen Pettigrove.

In this significant new work in African philosophy, Christopher Wise explores deconstruction's historical indebtedness to Egypto-African civilization and its relevance in Islamicate Africa today. He does so by comparing deconstructive and African thought on the spoken utterance, nothingness, conjuration, the oath or vow, occult sorcery, blood election, violence, circumcision, totemic inscription practices, animal metamorphosis and sacrifice, the Abrahamic, fratricide, and jihad. Situated against the backdrop of the Ansar Dine's recent jihad in Northern Mali, Sorcery, Totem and Jihad in African Philosophy examines the root causes of the conflict and offers insight into the Sahel's ancient, complex, and vibrant civilization. This book also demonstrates the relevance of deconstructive thought in the African setting, especially the writing of the Franco-Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida.

The Qurʾan contains many miracle stories, from Moses's staff turning into a serpent to Mary's conceiving Jesus as a virgin. In Understanding the Qurʾanic Miracle Stories in the Modern Age, Isra Yazicioglu offers a glimpse of the ways in which meaningful implications have been drawn from these apparently strange narratives, both in the premodern and modern era. It fleshes out a fascinating medieval Muslim debate over miracles and connects its insights with early and late modern turning points in Western thought and with contemporary Qurʾanic interpretation. Building on an apparent tension within the Qurʾan and analyzing crucial cases of classical and modern Muslim engagement with these miracle stories, this book illustrates how an apparent site of conflict between faith and reason, or revelation and science, can become a site of fruitful exchange.

This book is a distinctive contribution to a new trend in Qurʾanic studies: it reveals the presence of insightful Qurʾanic interpretation outside of the traditional line-by-line commentary genre, engaging with the works of Ghazali, Ibn Rushd, and Said Nursi. Moreover, focused as it is on the case of miracle stories, the book also goes beyond these specific passages to reflect more broadly on the issue of Qurʾanic hermeneutics. It notes the connections between literal and symbolic approaches and highlights the importance of approaching the Qurʾan with an eye to its potential implications for everyday life.

What did Jesus mean by the expression, the Kingdom of God? As an answer, Kevin Hart sketches a "phenomenology of the Christ" that explores the unique way Jesus performs phenomenology. According to Hart, philosophers and theologians continually reinterpret Jesus s teaching of the Kingdom so that there are effectively many Kingdoms of God. Working in, while also displacing, a tradition inaugurated by Husserl and continued by philosophers such as Heidegger, Marion, and Lacoste, Hart puts forward a new phenomenology of religion that claims that ethics and religion are not always unified or continuous."

A contemporary philosopher of Tunisian origin, Mehdi Belhaj Kacem is here published in English for the first time. His new book, Transgression and the Inexistent: A Philosophical Vocabulary, is a comprehensive foray into Kacem's elaborate philosophical system in twenty-seven discreet chapters, each dedicated to a single concept. In each chapter, he explicates a critical re-thinking of ordinary lived experiences - such as desire, irony, play - or traditional philosophical ideas - such as catharsis, mimesis, techne - in light of 'the spirit of nihilism' that marks the contemporary human condition. Kacem gained notoriety in the domain of critical theory amid his controversial break with his mentor and leading contemporary philosopher, Alain Badiou. Transgression and the Inexistent lays out the essential concepts of his philosophical system: it is the most complete and synthetic book of his philosophical work, as well as being one of the most provocative in its claims. As a Francophone author engaging with contemporary world thought, he is able to develop novel philosophical perspectives that reach beyond the Middle East or the Continental, and the East/West binary. This is the book's first publication in any language, constituting a much-awaited first translation of Kacem into English.

The essays in Religious Upbringing and the Costs of Freedom are the personal stories of philosophers who were brought up religiously and have broken free, in one way or another, from restraint and oppression. As trained philosophers, they are well equipped to reflect on and analyze their experiences. In this book, they offer not only stories of stress and liberation but ruminations on the moral issues that arise when parents and other caregivers, in seeking to do good by their children, sometimes end up doing real harm to their personal development and sense of autonomy as individuals.

In addition to the editors, the contributors are Raymond D. Bradley, Damien Alexander DuPont, Diane Enns, Paul H. Hirst, Amalia Jiva, Irfan Khawaja, Christine Overall, Tasia R. Persson, and Glen Pettigrove.

This book offers a new reading of Jonathan Edwards's virtue ethic that examines a range of qualities Edwards identifies as "virtues" and considers their importance for contemporary ethics. Each of Edwards's human virtues is "receptive" in nature: humans acquire the virtues through receiving divine grace, and therefore depend utterly on Edwards's God for virtue's acquisition. By contending that humans remain authentic moral agents even as they are unable to attain virtue apart from his God's assistance, Edwards challenges contemporary conceptions of moral responsibility, which tend to emphasize human autonomy as a central part of accountability.

The twelfth-century philosopher Averroes is often identified by modern Arab thinkers as an early advocate of the Enlightenment. Saud M. S. Al-Tamamy demonstrates that an historical as well as comparative approach to Averroes' thought refutes this widely held assumption. The philosophical doctrine of Averroes is compared with that of the key figure of the Enlightenment in Western thought, Immanuel Kant. By comparing Averroes and Kant, Al-Tamamy evaluates the ideologies of each thinker's work and in particular focuses on their respective political implications on two social groups: the Elite, in Averroes' case, and the Public, in the case of Kant. The book's methodology is at once historical, analytical and communicative, and is especially relevant when so many thinkers - both Western and Middle Eastern - are anxious to find common denominators between the formations of Islamic and Western cultures. It responds to a need for comparative analysis in the field of Averroes studies, and takes on the challenge to uncover the philosopher's influence on the Enlightenment.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a Persian Sufist is the subject of volume 28 in the "Library of Living Philosophers" series. As in the other volumes of the series, the subject discusses his life and philosophical development in an intellectual autobiography. This is followed by 33 critical essays by various scholars and Nasr's replies to each of them. Nasr has been influential in the fields of comparative religion, theology and Islamic studies, as well as philosophy and comparative philosophy. He is also known for his writings on the history of art, the history of science and Sufism (Islamic Mysticism).

Responding to our modern disillusionment with any claims to absolute truth regarding morality or reality, this book offers a conceptual approach for discussing absolutes without denying either the relevance of divergent religious and philosophical teachings or the evidence supporting postmodern and poststructuralist critiques. Case studies of mysticism within Advaita-Vedānta Hinduism, Mādhyamika Buddhism, and Nicene Christianity demonstrate the value of this approach and offer many fresh insights into the metaphysical presuppositions of these religions as well as into the nature and value of mystical experience. Like Douglas Hofstadter's Gōdel, Escher, Bach, this book finds ultimate reality to be rationally graspable only as an eternal fugue of pattern and paradox. Yet it does not so much counter other philosophical views as provide a conceptual tool for understanding and classifying incommensurable views.

Reflecting upon some problems of the moral life, Gilbert Meilaender considers their difficulties within a vision that accentuates not only the limits, but also the promise, of the Christian story. Created by God as finite beings, we make particular attachments. Redeemed by God for a community transcending nature and history, our love always carries us beyond the special bonds of time and place. We live, therefore, with a sense of permanent tension.

If this tension heightens our sense of the perplexities of life, it should not free us from the obligation to probe, clarify, and (where we can) resolve some of those difficulties. The author holds that theological ethics must clarify the direction for growth and development within the Christian life. He undertakes such analysis, emphasizing throughout the limits of the human condition, the importance of our nature as embodied persons, and the danger and pretension in some of our attempts to take control of and master human life. This Christian vision is developed in chapters that explore a range of moral problems, such as abortion, artificial reproduction, euthanasia, care for defective infants, provision of artificial nutrition and hydration, and marital and political community. These are throughout, however, theological explorations. Taken together they illumine not only particular problems of the moral life but a vision of life--classically Christian in its conception, humane in its care for particular bonds of attachment, and modest in its recognition of moral limits on our ability to seek the good.

Meilaender has developed a broad recognition both among scholars and students of ethics and among interested general readers. He has the capacity to throw fresh angles of vision on complex problems so as to help both the sophisticated and the uninitiated reader to think more penetratingly about moral questions.

Without the notes, Erasmus said, the texts of the Scripture were 'naked and defenceless,' open to criticism by uncomprehending readers and corruption by careless printers. The Annotations represent not only Erasmus' defence of the New Testament against such abuss, but also a reflection of his own philosophy, objectives, and working methods. In establishing the text and defending it against his opponents, Erasmus drew on manuscript sources, classical literature, patristic writings, scholastic exegesis, and the work of his immediate forerunners, Valla and Lefevre. He did not hesitate to point out the errors of illustrious writers like Jerome and established medieval authorities like Peter Lombard. In general he was appreciative of the early church Fathers and contemptuous of medieval commentators. As well as discussing the contents and aims of the Annotations, Erika Rummel investigates Erasmus' development from philologist to theologian and traces the prepublication history of the New Testament. She examines the critical reaction of conservative theologians to Erasmus' work and his replies, incorporated in later editions of the Annotations. The book ends by suggesting a wider field of research: the relationship between the Annotations and the corpus of Erasmian apologetic works.

The Hwa Yen school of Mahāyāna Buddhism bloomed in China in the 7th and 8th centuries A.D. Today many scholars regard its doctrines of Emptiness, Totality, and Mind-Only as the crown of Buddhist thought and as a useful and unique philosophical system and explanation of man, world, and life as intuitively experienced in Zen practice.

For the first time in any Western language Garma Chang explains and exemplifies these doctrines with references to both oriental masters and Western philosophers. The Buddha's mystical experience of infinity and totality provides the framework for this objective revelation of the three pervasive and interlocking concepts upon which any study of Mahāyāna philosophy must depend.

Following an introductory section describing the essential differences between Judeo-Christian and Buddhist philosophy, Professor Chang provides an extensive, expertly developed section on the philosophical foundations of Hwa Yen Buddhism dealing with the core concept of True Voidness, the philosophy of Totality, and the doctrine of Mind-Only. A concluding section includes selections of Hwa Yen readings and biographies of the patriarchs, as well as a glossary and list of Chinese terms.