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Author: Susan Emanuel
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
Published: 2011-08-22
Total Pages: 234
ISBN-13: 1459627520
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe religious transformations that marked late antiquity represent an enigma that has challenged some of the West's greatest thinkers. But, according to Guy Stroumsa, the oppositions between paganism and Christianity that characterize prevailing theories have endured for too long. Instead of describing this epochal change as an evolution within ...
Author: René Girard
Publisher: MSU Press
Published: 2011-04
Total Pages: 124
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn Sacrifice, René Girard interrogates the Brahmanas of Vedic India, exploring coincidences with mimetic theory that are too numerous and striking to be accidental. Even that which appears to be dissimilar fails to contradict mimetic theory, but instead corresponds to the minimum of illusion without which sacrifice becomes impossible. The Bible reveals collective violence, similar to that which generates sacrifice everywhere, but instead of making victims guilty, the Bible and the Gospels reveal the persecutors of a single victim. Instead of elaborating myths, they tell the truth absolutely contrary to the archaic sense. Once exposed, the single victim mechanism can no longer function as the model for would-be sacrificers. Recognizing that the Vedic tradition also converges on a revelation that discredits sacrifice, mimetic theory locates within sacrifice itself a paradoxical power of quiet reflection that leads, in the long run, to the eclipse of this institution which is violent but nevertheless fundamental to the development of human culture. Far from unduly privileging the Western tradition and awarding it a monopoly on the knowledge and repudiation of blood sacrifice, mimetic analysis recognizes comparable, but never truly identical, traits in the Vedic tradition.
Author: Peter Jackson
Publisher: Equinox Publishing (UK)
Published: 2016
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781781791257
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis volume addresses the means and ends of sacrificial speculation by inviting a selected group of specialist in the fields of philosophy, history of religions, and indology to examine philosophical modes of sacrificial speculation -- especially in Ancient India and Greece -- and consider the commonalities of their historical raison d'être. Scholars have long observed, yet without presenting any transcultural grand theory on the matter, that sacrifice seems to end with (or even continue as) philosophy in both Ancient India and Greece. How are we to understand this important transformation that so profoundly changed the way we think of religion (and philosophy as opposed to religion) today? Some of the complex topics inviting closer examination in this regard are the interiorisation of ritual, ascetism and self-sacrifice, sacrifice and cosmogony, the figure of the philosopher-sage, transformations and technologies of the self, analogical reasoning, the philosophy of ritual, vegetarianism, and metempsychosis.
Author: Terry Eagleton
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2018-01-01
Total Pages: 215
ISBN-13: 0300233353
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA trenchant analysis of sacrifice as the foundation of the modern, as well as the ancient, social order The modern conception of sacrifice is at once cast as a victory of self-discipline over desire and condescended to as destructive and archaic abnegation. But even in the Old Testament, the dual natures of sacrifice, embodying both ritual slaughter and moral rectitude, were at odds. In this analysis, Terry Eagleton makes a compelling argument that the idea of sacrifice has long been misunderstood. Pursuing the complex lineage of sacrifice in a lyrical discourse, Eagleton focuses on the Old and New Testaments, offering a virtuosic analysis of the crucifixion, while drawing together a host of philosophers, theologians, and texts--from Hegel, Nietzsche, and Derrida to the Aeneid and The Wings of the Dove. Brilliant meditations on death and eros, Shakespeare and St. Paul, irony and hybridity explore the meaning of sacrifice in modernity, casting off misperceptions of barbarity to reconnect the radical idea to politics and revolution.
Author: Roger Crisp
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-09-03
Total Pages: 349
ISBN-13: 019257695X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDoes being virtuous make you happy? Roger Crisp examines the answers to this ancient question provided by the so-called 'British Moralists', from Thomas Hobbes, around 1650, for the next two hundred years, until Jeremy Bentham. This involves elucidating their views on happiness (self-interest, or well-being) and on virtue (or morality), in order to bring out the relation of each to the other. Themes ran through many of these writers: psychological egoism, evaluative hedonism, and—after Hobbes—the acceptance of self-standing moral reasons. But there are exceptions, and even those taking the standard views adopt them for very different reasons and express them in various ways. As the ancients tended to believe that virtue and happiness largely coincide, so these modern authors are inclined to accept posthumous reward and punishment. Both positions sit uneasily with the common-sense idea that a person can truly sacrifice their own good for the sake of morality or for others. This book shows that David Hume—a hedonist whose ethics made no appeal to the afterlife—was the first major British moralist to allow for, indeed to recommend, such self-sacrifice. Morality and well-being of course remain central to modern ethics, and Crisp demonstrates how much there is to learn from this remarkable group of philosophers.
Author: Giosue Ghisalberti
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Published: 2018-08-24
Total Pages: 294
ISBN-13: 1532652062
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSoteriology and the End of Animal Sacrifice traces the historically sustained critique of animal sacrifice in both the Jewish prophets and Greek philosophers and offers a reinterpretation of the fundamental expression of piety in both cultures. The Jewish prophets, such as Isaiah, and Greek philosophers beginning with Pythagoras, provided not only an unequivocal denunciation of animal sacrifice as a religious ritual. Equally important, they also offered an alternative conception of piety in and through a language dedicated to the therapeutic health and well-being of others. In the philosophies of Socrates and Epicurus in the Greek world and in the teaching and healing of Jesus in the Jewish world of first-century Palestine, we reach a decisive moment in the revolution of religion in the ancient world. The practice of animal sacrifice in the temples of Greece and Jerusalem begins to be reconceived and eventually abolished and replaced by a soteriology or healing wholly dedicated to the well-being of individuals no less than entire societies. The replacement of animal sacrifice with soteriological speech is the single most important revolution in the religions of antiquity.
Author: David L. Weddle
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2017-09-19
Total Pages: 261
ISBN-13: 0814762816
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn examination of the practice and philosophy of sacrifice in three religious traditions In the book of Genesis, God tests the faith of the Hebrew patriarch Abraham by demanding that he sacrifice the life of his beloved son, Isaac. Bound by common admiration for Abraham, the religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam also promote the practice of giving up human and natural goods to attain religious ideals. Each tradition negotiates the moral dilemmas posed by Abraham’s story in different ways, while retaining the willingness to perform sacrifice as an identifying mark of religious commitment. This book considers the way in which Jews, Christians, and Muslims refer to “sacrifice”—not only as ritual offerings, but also as the donation of goods, discipline, suffering, and martyrdom. Weddle highlights objections to sacrifice within these traditions as well, presenting voices of dissent and protest in the name of ethical duty. Sacrifice forfeits concrete goods for abstract benefits, a utopian vision of human community, thereby sparking conflict with those who do not share the same ideals. Weddle places sacrifice in the larger context of the worldviews of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, using this nearly universal religious act as a means of examining similarities of practice and differences of meaning among these important world religions. This book takes the concept of sacrifice across these three religions, and offers a cross-cultural approach to understanding its place in history and deep-rooted traditions.
Author: Jacques Derrida
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 1996-06
Total Pages: 123
ISBN-13: 0226143066
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn The Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida's most sustained consideration of religion to date, he continues to explore questions introduced in Given Time about the limits of the rational and responsible that one reaches in granting or accepting death, whether by sacrifice, murder, execution, or suicide. Derrida analyzes Patocka's Heretical Essays on the History of Philosophy and develops and compares his ideas to the works of Heidegger, Levinas, and Kierkegaard. A major work, The Gift of Death resonates with much of Derrida's earlier writing and will be of interest to scholars in anthropology, philosophy, and literary criticism, along with scholars of ethics and religion. "The Gift of Death is Derrida's long-awaited deconstruction of the foundations of the project of a philosophical ethics, and it will long be regarded as one of the most significant of his many writings."—Choice "An important contribution to the critical study of ethics that commends itself to philosophers, social scientists, scholars of relgion . . . [and those] made curious by the controversy that so often attends Derrida."—Booklist "Derrida stares death in the face in this dense but rewarding inquiry. . . . Provocative."—Publishers Weekly
Author: Aldous Huxley
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2012-02-14
Total Pages: 356
ISBN-13: 0061893315
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn inspired gathering of religious writings that reveals the "divine reality" common to all faiths, collected by Aldous Huxley "The Perennial Philosophy," Aldous Huxley writes, "may be found among the traditional lore of peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions." With great wit and stunning intellect—drawing on a diverse array of faiths, including Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Christian mysticism, and Islam—Huxley examines the spiritual beliefs of various religious traditions and explains how they are united by a common human yearning to experience the divine. The Perennial Philosophy includes selections from Meister Eckhart, Rumi, and Lao Tzu, as well as the Bhagavad Gita, Tibetan Book of the Dead, Diamond Sutra, and Upanishads, among many others.
Author: Thomas M. Lennon
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2019-07-01
Total Pages: 318
ISBN-13: 900440449X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHow much of our own self- interest should we be willing to sacrifice for love of another? The Quietists answered, all of it, even the salvation of our own soul. Opposing them were the Jansenists, including Arnauld, who saw self-interest as inescapable. The debate swept across French society in the 17th century, with Bossuet and Fénelon on opposite sides, and was multi- dimensional, with political and ecclesiastical intrigue, charges of heresy, and many shenanigans. Initially theological, the debate’s basis lay in differing philosophical concepts of freewill, with both sides claiming support from Descartes’s views. The debate thus highlights interpretation of the Cartesians, especially Malebranche, a prominent participant in it. Nevertheless, this is the first book on the debate in English.
