First comprehensive book on comparative religion. Born in Hanover, New Hampshire, James Freeman Clarke attended the Boston Latin School, graduated from Harvard College in 1829, and Harvard Divinity School in 1833. Ordained into the Unitarian church he first became an active minister at Louisville, Kentucky, then a slave state and soon threw himself into the national movement for the abolition of slavery.

Arne Gron's reading of Soren Kierkegaard's authorship revolves around existential challenges of human identity. The 35 essays that constitute this book are written over three decades and are characterized by combining careful attention to the augmentative detail of Kierkegaard's text with a constant focus on issues in contemporary philosophy. Contrary to many approaches to Kierkegaard's authorship, Gron does not read Kierkegaard in opposition to Hegel. The work of the Danish thinker is read as a critical development of Hegelian phenomenology with particular attention to existential aspects of human experience. Anxiety and despair are the primary existential phenomena that Kierkegaard examines throughout his authorship, and Gron uses these negative phenomena to argue for the basically ethical aim of Kierkegaard's work. In Gron's reading, Kierkegaard conceives human selfhood not merely as relational, but also a process of becoming the self that one is through the otherness of self-experience, that is, the body, the world, other people, and God. This book should be of interest to philosophers, theologians, literary studies scholars, and anyone with an interest not only in Kierkegaard, but also in human identity.

Ernst Troeltsch was a theologian and sociologist but he was also a philosopher of culture. He was concerned with the "spirit of the modern world" throughout most of his academic life and chose to investigate a number of critical issues which he believed were especially problematic for the modern world. This book is an exploration of many of the key issues. It begins with an explanation of what Troeltsch believed the "spirit of the modern world" to be and then to explaining the debt that Troeltsch owed to Friedrich Schleiermacher for an understanding of the modern world. Chapters are then devoted to Troeltsch's investigations into issues such as the relationship between church and state, the role of natural law, the problems of historicism and pessimism, and it concludes with his observations about politics in war and in revolution. This work will be of interest to those concerned with understanding the modern world.

In Nietzsche's Search for Philosophy: On the Middle Writings Keith Ansell-Pearson makes a novel and thought-provoking contribution to our appreciation of Nietzsche's neglected middle writings. These are the texts Human, All Too Human (1878-80), Dawn (1881), and The Gay Science (1882). There is a truth in the observation of Havelock Ellis that the works Nietzsche produced between 1878 and 1882 represent the maturity of his genius. In this study he explores key aspects of Nietzsche's philosophical activity in his middle writings, including his conceptions of philosophy, his commitment to various enlightenments, his critique of fanaticism, his search for the heroic-idyllic, his philosophy of modesty and his conception of ethics, and his search for joy and happiness. The book will appeal to readers across philosophy and the humanities, especially to those with an interest in Nietzsche and anyone who has a concern with the fate of philosophy in the modern world.

The American-Jewish philosopher Berel Lang has left an indelible impression on an unusually broad range of fields that few scholars can rival. From his earliest innovations in philosophy and meta-philosophy, to his ground-breaking work on representation, historical writing, and art after Auschwitz, he has contributed original and penetrating insights to the philosophical, literary, and historical debates on ethics, art, and the representation of the Nazi Genocide. In honor of Berel Lang's five decades of scholarly and philosophical contributions, the editors of Ethics, Art and Representations of the Holocaust invited seventeen eminent scholars from around the world to discuss Lang's impact on their own research and to reflect on how the Nazi genocide continues to resonate in contemporary debates about antisemitism, commemoration and poetic representations. Resisting what Alvin Rosenfeld warned as "the end of the Holocaust", the essays in this collection signal the Holocaust as an event without closure, of enduring resonance to new generations of scholars of genocide, Jewish studies, and philosophy. Readers will find original and provocative essays on topics as diverse as Nietzsche's reputed Nazi leanings, Jewish anti-apartheid activists in South Africa, wartime rescue in Poland, philosophical responses to the Holocaust, hidden diaries in the Kovno Ghetto, and analyses of reactions to trauma in classic literary works by Bernhard Schlink, Sylvia Plath, and Derek Walcott.

Mary Midgley is one of the most influential moral philosophers of the twentieth century. Over the last 40 years, Midgley's writings on such central yet controversial topics as human nature, morality, science, animals, the environment, religion, and gender have shaped the landscape of contemporary philosophy. She is celebrated for the complexity, nuance, and sensibility with which she approaches some of the most challenging issues in philosophy without falling into the pitfalls of close-minded extremism. In turn, Midgley's sophisticated treatment of the interconnected and often muddled issues related to human nature has drawn interest from outside the philosophical world, stretching from scientists, artists, theologians, anthropologists, and journalists to the public more broadly. Mary Midgley: An Introduction systematically introduces readers to Midgley's collected thought on the most central and influential areas of her corpus. Through clear and lively engagement with Midgley's work, this volume offers readers accessible explanation, interpretation, and analysis of the concepts and perspectives for which she is best known, most notably her integrated understanding of human nature, her opposition to reductionism and scientism, and her influential conception of our relationship to animals and the wider world. These insights, supplemented by excerpts from original interviews with Midgley herself, provide readers of all backgrounds with an informed understanding and appreciation of Mary Midgley and the philosophical problems to which she has devoted her life's work.

Reading Augustine presents concise, personal readings of St. Augustine of Hippo from leading philosophers and religion scholars. Augustine of Hippo knew that this fallen world is a place of sadness and suffering. In such a world, he determined that compassion is the most suitable and virtuous response. Its transformative powers could be accessed through the mind and its memories, through the healing of the Incarnation, and through the discernment of Christians who are forced to navigate through a corrupt and deceptive world. Susan Wessel considers Augustine's theology of compassion by examining his personal experience of loss and his reflections concerning individual and corporate suffering in the context of the human condition and salvation.

The book re-examines the religious thought and receptions of the Syrian poet Abu l-'Ala' al-Ma'arri (d.1057) and one of his best known works - Luzum ma la yalzam (The Self-Imposed Unnecessity), a collection of poems, which, although widely studied, needs a thorough re-evaluation regarding matters of (un)belief. Given the contradictory nature of al-Ma'arri's oeuvre and Luzum in particular, there have been two major trends in assessing al-Ma'arri's religious thought in modern scholarship. One presented al-Ma'arri as an unbeliever and a freethinker arguing that through contradictions, he practiced taqiya, i.e., dissimulation in order to avoid persecution. The other, often apologetically, presented al-Ma'arri as a sincere Muslim. This study proposes that the notion of ambivalence is a more appropriate analytical tool to apply to the reading of Luzum, specifically in matters of belief. This ambivalence is directly conditioned by the historical and intellectual circumstances al-Ma'arri lived in and he intentionally left it unsolved and intense as a robust stance against claims of certainty. Going beyond reductive interpretations, the notion of ambivalence allows for an integrative paradigm in dealing with contradictions and dissonance.