BiblioVault - Books about Transcendence (Philosophy)

The Book of Job and the Immanent Genesis of Transcendence

Davis Hankins

Northwestern University Press, 2015

Winner of the 2017 Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise

Recent philosophical reexaminations of sacred texts have focused almost exclusively on the Christian New Testament, and Paul in particular. The Book of Job and the Immanent Genesis of Transcendence revives the enduring philosophical relevance and political urgency of the book of Job and thus contributes to the recent “turn toward religion” among philosophers such as Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou.

Job is often understood to be a trite folktale about human limitation in the face of confounding and absolute transcendence. On the contrary, Hankins demonstrates that Job is a drama about the struggle to create a just and viable life in a material world that is ontologically incomplete and consequently open to radical, unpredictable transformation. Job’s abiding legacy for any future materialist theology becomes clear as Hankins analyzes Job’s dramatizations of a transcendence that is not externally opposed to but that emerges from an ontologically incomplete material world.

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Knowledge and the Transcendent

An Inquiry into the Mind's Relationship to God

Paul A. Macdonald Jr.

Catholic University of America Press, 2009

Knowledge and the Transcendent advances the provocative claim that the human mind is not "bounded" on the outside but actually remains "open" to the world and to God.

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Reason, Revelation, and Metaphysics

Montague Brown

Catholic University of America Press, 2021

Any realist metaphysics must include an integrated account of the transcendentals and the analogy of being, for an adequate metaphysics must be about everything, and all things share in some key metaphysical characteristic—being, unity, truth, goodness, and beauty. However, they do not share in them in exactly the same way. Therefore, there is need to explain the transcendental characteristics in an analogical way. By using the phrase “transcendental analogies,” Reason, Revelation and Metaphysics claims that there are analogies of unity, truth, goodness, and beauty, which are related to, but irreducible to, the analogy of being. As this book is a systematic study of the topic, theoretical reason has primacy in the project and metaphysics is given pride of place. But reason is practical and aesthetic as well; that is, our consciences urge us to seek what is good, and we are delighted by what is beautiful. Although goodness and beauty are not reducible to truth, they must be included in any adequate metaphysical account, for metaphysics looks to explain everything. Although metaphysics is traditionally thought to be a philosophical project involving ontology and natural theology, Montague Brown argues that an adequate metaphysics must ultimately be theological, including within its scope the truths of revelation. Philosophical reason’s examination of the transcendental analogies raises questions that it cannot answer. We experience a world of many beings, truths, goods, and beauties. Recognizing that these many instances have something in common, we affirm a transcendent instance of each (traditionally called God). However, although we know that a transcendent instance exists, we do not know its nature: therefore, we cannot say how it is related to the other instances. If we try to apply this transcendent instance as the prime analogate to shed light on the other analogates, we must fail, for the abstractness and universality of the transcendent instance can add nothing to our understanding of the particular instances. Wanting to know how the many exist and are related, philosophical reason finds no way forward and recognizes its need for help. It is the thesis of this book that reason finds this help only in the revelation of the God’s covenantal relation with the world. The first principle of all things—most perfectly revealed in Jesus Christ, perfect God and perfect man—is really and freely related to us. Only by accepting this revealed prime analogate can the transcendental analogies bear fruit in our ongoing quest for understanding.

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A Time for Wisdom

Knowledge, Detachment, Tranquility, Transcendence

Paul T. McLaughlin

Templeton Press, 2022

These are volatile times. Fear, suspicion, and cynicism are chronic. A mere tweet inflames the passions of millions while click-bait “hot takes” stoke the amygdalas of everyone with an Internet connection. We treat those not in our tribe as a threat and deem anyone with a different opinion as evil. Mistaking myopia for measure, we lack all sense of proportion in our judgments. We are shortsighted, mired in the present, ignorant of history, and blind to the future. We thought that technology would save us by connecting us to each other and the world’s information. Instead, it enticed our vices, encouraged our biases, and eroded the one virtue we need now more than ever: wisdom.

A Time for Wisdom is for readers who feel beleaguered by the incivility of the modern world, dispirited by its coarse rhetoric and toxic partisanship. It is an invitation to escape the shallow cacophony and restore peace and perspective to our daily lives. Written by two psychologists, the book takes the best scientific research on wisdom and integrates it with timeless concepts that have, for ages, guided troubled souls through life’s hardships. From this foundation, the authors present four steps we can follow to practice wisdom in the 21st Century:

Receiving knowledge.
Practicing detachment.
Experiencing tranquility.
Cultivating transcendence.

These are profound and spiritual principles that can bring us immense satisfaction when we aspire to live by them.

In A Time for Wisdom, the authors show us how. They commend a course of action towards the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, towards calm and clear moral reasoning. They lead us out of the circus of contemporary life and show us a path beyond our petty self-centeredness. By journeying along that path, we can, like the great sages and scientists before us, rise above the immediacy of the moment and partake of the numinous and the infinite.

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Transcendence and History

The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity

Glenn Hughes

University of Missouri Press, 2020

Transcendence and History is an analysis of what philosopher Eric Voegelin described as “the decisive problem of philosophy”: the dilemma of the discovery of transcendent meaning and the impact of this discovery on human self-understanding. The world’s major religious and wisdom traditions are built upon the recognition of transcendent meaning, and our own cultural and linguistic heritage has long since absorbed the postcosmological division of reality into the two dimensions of “transcendence” and “immanence.” But the last three centuries in the West have seen a growing resistance to the idea of transcendent meaning; contemporary and “postmodern” interpretations of the human situation—both popular and intellectual—indicate a widespread eclipse of confidence in the truth of transcendence.

In Transcendence and History, Glenn Hughes contributes to the understanding of transcendent meaning and the problems associated with it, assisting in the philosophical recovery of the legitimacy of the notion of transcendence. Depending primarily on the treatments of transcendence found in the writings of twentieth-century philosophers Eric Voegelin and Bernard Lonergan, Hughes explores the historical discovery of transcendent meaning and then examines what it indicates about the structure of history. Hughes’s main focus, however, is on clarifying the problem of transcendence in relation to historical existence. Addressing both layreaders and scholars, Hughes applies the insights and analyses of Voegelin and Lonergan to considerable advantage.

Transcendence and History will be of particular value to those who have grappled with the notion of transcendence in the study of philosophy, comparative religion, political theory, history, philosophical anthropology, and art or poetry. By examining transcendent meaning as the key factor in the search for ultimate meaning from ancient societies to the present, the book demonstrates how “the decisive problem of philosophy” both illuminates and presents a vital challenge to contemporary intellectual discourse.

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Transcendence and Wittgenstein's Tractatus

Michael P. Hodges

Temple University Press, 1990

Although Wittgenstein claimed that his first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, was essentially an ethical work, it has been viewed insistently as a purely logical one. His later work, Philosophical Investigations, is generally seen as presenting totally different ideas from his earlier writings. In this book, Michael Hodges shows how Wittgenstein’s later work emerged from his earlier Tractatus, and he unifies the early philosophy, both its well-known logical aspects and the lesser known ethical dimensions, in terms of the notion of transcendence.

Hodges studies the Tractatus in light of Wittgenstein’s own claim that the Philosophical Investigations can only be understood when read against the background of the Tractatus. At the heart of an understanding of the earlier work is the idea of transcendence which structures both Wittgenstein’s logical and ethical insights. Seen in terms of this notion, the rigorous unity of Wittgenstein’s early thinking becomes apparent and the gestalt shift to the later philosophy comes clearly into focus.

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