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A groundbreaking exposition of Islamic mysticism The Essence of Reality was written over the course of just three days in 514/1120, by a scholar who was just twenty-four. The text, like its author ʿAyn al-Quḍāt, is remarkable for many reasons, not least of which that it is in all likelihood the earliest philosophical exposition of mysticism in the Islamic intellectual tradition. This important work would go on to exert significant influence on both classical Islamic philosophy and philosophical mysticism. Written in a terse yet beautiful style, The Essence of Reality consists of one hundred brief chapters interspersed with Qurʾanic verses, prophetic sayings, Sufi maxims, and poetry. In conversation with the work of the philosophers Avicenna and al-Ghazālī, the book takes readers on a philosophical journey, with lucid expositions of questions including the problem of the eternity of the world; the nature of God’s essence and attributes; the concepts of “before” and “after”; and the soul’s relationship to the body. All these discussions are seamlessly tied into ʿAyn al-Quḍāt’s foundational argument—that mystical knowledge lies beyond the realm of the intellect.
George Santayana (1862-1952) of Spanish descent, and generally claimed to be in the canon of American philosophers, was substantially influenced by his Roman Catholic origins in his philosophical disposition toward the value of tradition, religious symbols and dogma. His philosophical project sustained a respectful attitude toward the spiritual value of orthodox religion while the thrust of his philosophy was naturalistic and materialistic throughout. There is a perception by some scholars that Santayana's philosophy evolved from a humanistic perspective to a more spiritual one in his later years. It is the position of this thesis that his philosophy, at the "core" depicting a harmonious striving toward individual happiness, remained essentially consistent from his earliest publication of Interpretations of Poetry and Religion and The Life of Reason through his later works of Scepticism and Animal Faith, Realms of Being, Dominations and Powers and The Idea of Christ in the Gospels. Santayana's philosophical approach is both phenomenological and social constructionist in its methodology, significantly preempting the methodology of social constructionist theology and a post-modern interpretation of religion. His idiosyncratic phenomenological approach is compared with a "benchmark" methodology of Edmund Husserl, the generally accepted founder of the phenomenological method. There are also important similarities between Santayana's phenomenological approach and those of Charles Sanders Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead. The basis for the comparison of the phenomenological methodology of Santayana and Husserl is their mutually similar fundamental theory of intuited essence. Santayana's contribution to religious studies is not only philosophical but also theological where he has utilized Christian theological language in transposing and interpolating his philosophy of religion to the Christian drama of the salvational Christ. Santayana's essay "Ultimate Religion" reflects his perspective of a disillusioned but still spiritual vision incorporating the piety, discipline, and spirituality; of a life of reason. Within the framework of this "model" Santayana's philosophy of religion is developed and explored. Finally, the relevance of Santayana's philosophy of religion to contemporary religious studies and selected religious issues is addressed with a delineation and discussion of some important aspects of his philosophical vision.
wide criticism both from Western and Eastern scholars.
First published in 1999. The purpose of this series is to provide a contemporary assessment and history of the entire course of philosophical thought. Each book constitutes a detailed, critical introduction to the work of a philosopher of major influence and significance. The arguments of the philosophers take on many differing forms. Those of George Santayana bear little similarity to what we find today in the Journal of Philosophy: indeed, some have been misled by his imagery and splendid prose style to believe that no arguments are being made at all in Santayana’s many books. Timothy Sprigge’s gift is an ability to draw clear ties between these writings and important contemporary issues, and to show that Santayana makes a contribution to today’s arguments.
Exploring the full range of Husserl's work, these essays reveal just how systematic his philosophy is. An underlying theme is resistance to the idea, current in much intellectual history, of a radical break between "modern" and "postmodern" philosophy, with Husserl as the last of the great Cartesians.
In the preface to the second edition of The Last Puritan, George Santayana wrote that he saw this "memoir in the form of a novel" as an exemplification of his own spirit. H. T. Kirby-Smith uses Santayana's 1936 novel The Last Puritan as both an occasion and a means for bringing into focus the complex relations between Santayana's life, his personality, and his philosophy.
Naturalism’s Philosophy of the Sacred: Justus Buchler, Karl Jaspers, and George Santayana offers an interpretation of the sacred based on the ordinal naturalism of Justus Buchler, one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century whose work is experiencing a renaissance. This book seeks to find common ground between theists and atheists by arguing that religious beliefs should be retained because they provide a poetic response to nature’s mysteries, while also addressing the atheist’s concerns regarding the tendency of religious believers to demonize nonbelievers and to idolize their own conceptions of the sacred. The heart of Martin O. Yalcin’s argument is that religious violence can be traced to the belief that God is far more real and therefore far more valuable than nature. In contrast to this view, he develops a philosophy of the sacred from the perspective of ontological parity which holds that all things are equally real. He argues that when the sacred is leveled to the plane of nature as one of its innumerable orders, then the virtues of piety and charity replace the vices of demonization and idolization so evident in religions that insist on the utter incommensurability of God with respect to the created order. In the course of developing an aesthetic interpretation of the sacred, Yalcin explores not only the metaphysical categories of Justus Buchler, but also those of Karl Jaspers and George Santayana. The dialogue with Jaspers unearths the absolute otherness of the sacred as the intrinsically unethical dimension of any variant of theism. Having undermined the total absolution of the sacred, Naturalism’s Philosophy of the Sacred suggests an alternative aesthetic form of sacred engagement that piggybacks on Santayana’s thoroughly natural poetic rendition of the sacred. This book will be of great value to students and scholars working in departments of religion, philosophy, and theology.
From the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, George Santayana was a highly esteemed and widely read writer of philosophy, poetry, essays, memoirs, and even a best-selling novel, The Last Puritan. After a period of relative neglect, interest in his work has revived. A complete edited edition of his works is in progress and he has become the object of renewed scholarly activity. Contributing significantly to the renewal was John McCormick's 1987 biography, the first full-scale volume to treat an elusive figure's life and thought in the detail they deserve. Santayana's life was rich in its interior and outer associations. There was his birth and early childhood in Spain followed by a move to Boston, where he came under the influence of William James at Harvard. This led to his career at Harvard as a professor, where Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Conrad Aiken, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Walter Lippmann were among his devoted students. We see Santayana in correspondence and conversation with Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, Ezra Pound, and Robert Lowell. Predominant in Santayana's life was his philosophical work. Hostile to the dominant empiricism of Anglo-American philosophy, he left the academy and remained detached from both the political and ideological movements of early decades of the twentieth century. McCormick relates his skepticism and materialism to a form of idealism deriving from his classical education in Plato and Aristotle, together with his readings in Descartes and Spinoza. He presents Santayana as a supreme stylist in English, who lived a long life always consistent with his stoic epicureanism.