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. Its aim is to revive 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.

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.

Looks at the relationship between religion and literature and how both have appealed to the Western spiritual sensibility.

Examining romanticism in thought of Jewish philosopher. Franz Rosenzweig, this book compares his magnum opus, Star of Redemption, with Leo Baeck's essay, "Romantic Religion, " and Friedrich Schelling's Philosophy of Art, texts representing distinct and, to a large extent, opposed interpretations of romanticism.

Rosenzweig's thought was shaped by two intellectual history Germany's and Judaism's. Because romanticism had such a definitive impact on modern German writing and thought, it becomes a question whether, and to what extent, Rosenzweig, too, was a romantic. Part of the force of the question derives from the tensions sometimes noted between Jewish and romantic worldviews. In this book, author Ernest Rubinstein shows The Star of Redemption to be along the spectrum that extends between Baeck and Schelling, and thus illustrates a qualified romanticism.