In this groundbreaking study, Stephen H. Webb offers a new theological understanding of the material and spiritual: that, far from being contradictory, they unite in the very stuff of the eternal Jesus Christ.
Accepting matter as a perfection (or predicate) of the divine requires a rethinking of the immateriality of God, the doctrine of creation out of nothing, the Chalcedonian formula of the person of Christ, and the analogical nature of religious language. It also requires a careful reconsideration of Augustine's appropriation of the Neo-Platonic understanding of divine incorporeality as well as Origen's rejection of anthropomorphism. Webb locates his position in contrast to evolutionary theories of emergent materialism and the popular idea that the world is God's body. He draws on a little known theological position known as the ''heavenly flesh'' Christology, investigates the many misunderstandings of its origins and relation to the Monophysite movement, and supplements it with retrievals of Duns Scotus, Caspar Scwenckfeld and Eastern Orthodox reflections on the transfiguration. Also included in Webb's study are discussions of classical figures like Barth and Aquinas as well as more recent theological proposals from Bruce McCormack, David Hart, and Colin Gunton. Perhaps most provocatively, the book argues that Mormonism provides the most challenging, urgent, and potentially rewarding source for metaphysical renewal today.
Webb's concept of Christian materialism challenges traditional Christian common sense, and aims to show the way to a more metaphysically sound orthodoxy.

Our work in psychiatry always involves both sides of the mind-body divide. But despite much effort to clarify the nature of the relation between mind and body, this question is still a riddle. That is a puzzling situation, to put it mildly.

One central unresolved question in understanding the mind-brain relationship is not of an experimental type but stems from difficulties in the use of concepts. St. Augustine ( 400 CE) wrote that it is impossible for humans to understand how the mind is attached to the body. Despite the inherent paradox that humans as minds plus bodies are entirely puzzling and incomprehensible, this would appear to be an accurate statement until now, despite an extensive literature that tries to solve the difficulty, particularly as a result of the recent increase in the knowledge of brain function.

This essay, "Brain in Mind," shows that the difficulty is due to the Occidental tradition of metaphysics-ontology, which claims that reality is mindindependent; that belief eliminates the mind from reality, because the mind cannot become mind-independent. Principles from phenomenology (Jaspers) and constructivism (von Glasersfeld and others), and the awareness that all reality-structures involve the subject's pragmatic designing activity in an unstructured background, show a contradiction-free way of dealing with the question, which is also of help for other areas of knowledge.

What are the things that we assert, believe, and desire? The orthodox view among philosophers is eternalism: these are contents that have their truth-values eternally. Transient Truths provides the first book-length exposition and defense of the opposing view, temporalism: these are contents that can change their truth-values along with changes in the world. Berit Brogaard argues that temporal contents are contents and propositions in the full sense. This project involves a thorough analysis of how we talk about and retain mental states over time, an examination of how the phenomenology of mental states bear on the content of mental states, an analysis of how we pass on information in temporally extended conversations, and a revival of a Priorian tense logic. The view suggests a broader view according to which some types of representation have a determinate truth-value only relative to features about the subject who does the representing. If this view is right, successful semantic representation requires an eye on our own position in the world.

On the Intrinsic Value of Everything is an illuminating introduction to fundamental questions in ethics. How--and to what--we assign value, whether it is to events or experiences or objects or people, is central to ethics. Something is intrinsically valuable only if it would be valued for its own sake by all fully informed, properly functioning persons. Davison defends the controversial view that everything that exists is intrinsically valuable to some degree. If only some things are intrinsically valuable, what about other things? Where and how do we draw the cutoff point? If only living creatures are intrinsically valuable, what does this imply for how we value the environment? If everything has intrinsic value, what practical implications does this have for how we live our lives? How does this view fit with the traditional theistic idea that God is the source of goodness and truth? Both critics and proponents of the concept of intrinsic value will find something of interest in this careful investigation of the basic value structure of the world.

A team of leading philosophers presents original work on theories of parthood and of location. Topics covered include how we ought to axiomatise our mereology, whether we can reduce mereological relations to identity or to locative relations, whether Mereological Essentialism is true, different ways in which entities persist through space, time, spacetime, and even hypertime, conflicting intuitions we have about space, and what mereology and propositions can tell us about one another. The breadth and accessibility of the papers make this volume an excellent introduction for those not yet working on these topics. Further, the papers contain important contributions to these central areas of metaphysics, and thus are essential reading for anyone working in the field.

Exploring the rupture between Wittgenstein's early and late phases, Michael Smith provides an original re-assessment of the metaphysical consistencies that exist throughout his divergent texts. Smith shows how Wittgenstein's criticism of metaphysics typically invoked the very thing he was seeking to erase. Taking an alternative approach to the inherent contradiction in his work, the 'problem of metaphysics', as Smith terms it, becomes the organizing principle of Wittgenstein's thought rather than something to overcome. This metaphysical thread enables further reflection on the poetic nature of Wittgenstein's philosophy as well as his preoccupation with ethics and aesthetics as important factors mostly absent from the secondary literature. The turn to aesthetics is crucial to a re-assessment of Wittgenstein's legacy, and is done in conjunction with an innovative analysis of Nietzsche's critique of Kantian aesthetics and Kant's 'judgments of taste'. The result is a unique discussion of the limits and possibilities of metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics and the task of the philosopher more generally.

The first critical work to attempt the mammoth undertaking of reading Badiou's Being and Event as part of a sequence has often surprising, occasionally controversial results. Looking back on its publication Badiou declared: "I had inscribed my name in the history of philosophy". Later he was brave enough to admit that this inscription needed correction. The central elements of Badiou's philosophy only make sense when Being and Event is read through the corrective prism of its sequel, Logics of Worlds, published nearly twenty years later. At the same time as presenting the only complete overview of Badiou's philosophical project, this book is also the first to draw out the central component of Badiou's ontology: indifference. Concentrating on its use across the core elements Being and Event-the void, the multiple, the set and the event-Watkin demonstrates that no account of Badiou's ontology is complete unless it accepts that Badiou's philosophy is primarily a presentation of indifferent being. Badiou and Indifferent Being provides a detailed and lively section by section reading of Badiou's foundational work. It is a seminal source text for all Badiou readers.

The concept of resistance has always been central to the reception of Hegel's philosophy. The prevalent image of Hegel's system, which continues to influence the scholarship to this day, is that of an absolutist, monist metaphysics which overcomes all resistance, sublating or assimilating all differences into a single organic 'Whole'. For that reason, the reception of Hegel has always been marked by the question of how to resist Hegel: how to think that which remains outside of or other to the totalizing system of dialectics. In recent years the work of scholars such as Catherine Malabou, Slavoj Zizek, Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda has brought considerable nuance to this debate. A new reading of Hegel has emerged which challenges the idea that there is no place for difference, otherness or resistance in Hegel, both by refusing to reduce Hegel's complex philosophy to a straightforward systematic narrative and by highlighting particular moments within Hegel's philosophy which seem to counteract the traditional understanding of dialectics. This book brings together established and new voices in this field in order to show that the notion of resistance is central to this revaluation of Hegel.

Bringing together leading scholars from across the world, this is a comprehensive survey of the latest phenomenological research into the perennial philosophical problem of truth. Starting with an historical introduction chronicling the variations on truth at play in the Phenomenological tradition, the book explores how Husserls methodology equips us with the tools to thoroughly explore notions of truth, reality and knowledge. From these foundations, the book goes on to explore and extend the range of approaches that contemporary phenomenological research opens up in the face of the most profound ontological and epistemological questions raised by the tradition. In the final section, the authors go further still and explore how phenomenology relates to other variations on truth offered up by hermeneutic, deconstructive and narrative approaches.Across the 12 essays collected in this volume, Variations on Truth explores and maps a comprehensive and rigorous alternative to mainstream analytic discussions of truth, reality and understanding.

This volume investigates the neglected topic of mental action, and shows its importance for the metaphysics, epistemology, and phenomenology of mind. Twelve specially written essays address such questions as the following: Which phenomena should we count as mental actions--imagining, remembering, judging, for instance? How should we explain our knowledge of our mental actions, and what light does that throw on self-knowledge in general? What contributions do mental actions make to our consciousness? What is the relationship between the voluntary and the active, in the mental sphere? What are the similarities and differences between mental and physical action, and what can we learn about each from the other?

35 MINUTES and COUNTING, a true story of Micky Oldham, a woman who crossed over to the other side and came back to share the lessons of her experience.

After the final barrage of bullets from a crazed gunman, Micky lay on the floor for 35 minutes, waiting for medical assistance. During this time, she felt her psyche slip between reality and an unknown dimension. She came back with a message: life can bring a raincloud, but a rainbow waits w the promise of hope, as the sun begins to emerge from the darkness of the clouds.

"For anyone who has ever questioned, "what is life and death?" 35 MINUTES and COUNTING is a quick and breathtaking read."--JoAn Worden, CMSW, LMHP, and author.

For Gilles Deleuze, time is out of joint. For Michel Serres, it is a crumpled handkerchief. In both of these concepts, explicit references are made to the non-linear dynamics of Chaos and Complexity theory, as well as the New Sciences. The groundbreaking work of these key thinkers has the potential to instigate a radical break from traditional existentialist theories of time and history, affording us the opportunity to view history and historical events as a complex, non-linear system of feedback-loops, couplings and interfaces. In this collection, the first to address the comparative historiographies of Deleuze and Serres, twelve leading experts including William Connolly, Eugene Holland, Claire Colebrook and Elizabeth Grosz examine these alternative concepts of time and history, exposing critical arguments in this important and emerging field of research.