By way of essays and a selection of primary sources in parallel text, Biography, Historiography, and Modes of Philosophizing provides an introduction to a vast, significant, but neglected corpus of early modern literature: collective biography. It focuses especially on the various related strands of political, philosophical, and intellectual and cultural biography as well as on the intersection between biography, historiography, and philosophy. Individual texts from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century are presented as examples of how (...) the ancient collective biographical tradition--as represented above all by Plutarch, Suetonius, Diogenes Laertius, and Jerome--was received and transformed in the Renaissance and beyond in accordance with the needs of humanism, religious controversy, politics, and the development of modern philosophy and science"--Provided by publisehr. (shrink)

The essays in Religious Upbringing and the Costs of Freedom are the personal stories of philosophers who were brought up religiously and have broken free, in one way or another, from restraint and oppression. As trained philosophers, they are well equipped to reflect on and analyze their experiences. In this book, they offer not only stories of stress and liberation but ruminations on the moral issues that arise when parents and other caregivers, in seeking to do good by their (...) children, sometimes end up doing real harm to their personal development and sense of autonomy as individuals. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Raymond D. Bradley, Damien Alexander DuPont, Diane Enns, Paul H. Hirst, Amalia Jiva, Irfan Khawaja, Christine Overall, Tasia R. Persson, and Glen Pettigrove. (shrink)

Stephen Gaukroger traces the development of Descartes's thought in the social, religious, and intellectual context of seventeenth‐century Europe. Gaukroger describes Descartes's upbringing and his education at the Jesuit La Flèche collège, and shows the role these played in the development of his ground‐breaking work in philosophy and science. The book details the effects of his relationships with others on his work, both through collaboration and through conflict. It discusses the history of the composition of his major works and details (...) their structure and content. It documents the correspondence, which played a major part in the development of his thinking, both before and after publication. The book concludes, as it begins, with his correspondence with Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia on the subject of the passions. (shrink)

This is the first comprehensive biography of John Locke to be published in nearly a half century. Setting Locke's life within exciting historical and intellectual contexts, which included the English Civil War, religious persecution, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Roger Woolhouse interweaves an account of Locke's life with a summary and development of his ideas in theory of knowledge, philosophy of science, medicine, economics, philosophy of religion, and political philosophy. Systematic and encyclopedic in its coverage, Woolhouse's (...) class='Hi'>biography offers both an account and explanation of Locke's ideas, while treating seriously his emotional relationship with Elinor Parry. Based on broad research and many years of study of Locke's philosophy, this volume is an authoritative biography on one of the most significant early modern philosophers. (shrink)

"The day will come when not only my writings, but precisely my life--the intriguing secret of all the machinery--will be studied and studied." Søren Kierkegaard's remarkable combination of genius and peculiarity made this a fair if arrogant prediction. But Kierkegaard's life has been notoriously hard to study, so complex was the web of fact and fiction in his work. Joakim Garff's biography of Kierkegaard is thus a landmark achievement. A seamless blend of history, philosophy, and psychological insight, all conveyed (...) with novelistic verve, this is the most comprehensive and penetrating account yet written of the life and works of the enigmatic Dane who changed the course of intellectual history. Garff portrays Kierkegaard not as the all-controlling impresario behind some of the most important works of modern philosophy and religious thought--books credited with founding existentialism and prefiguring postmodernism--but rather as a man whose writings came to control him. Kierkegaard saw himself as a vessel for his writings, a tool in the hand of God, and eventually as a martyr singled out to call for the end of "Christendom." Garff explores the events and relationships that formed Kierkegaard, including his guilt-ridden relationship with his father, his rivalry with his brother, and his famously tortured relationship with his fiancée Regine Olsen. He recreates the squalor and splendor of Golden Age Copenhagen and the intellectual milieu in which Kierkegaard found himself increasingly embattled and mercilessly caricatured. Acclaimed as a major cultural event on its publication in Denmark in 2000, this book, here presented in an exceptionally crisp and elegant translation, will be the definitive account of Kierkegaard's life for years to come. (shrink)

The 1994 biography of Lenin by General Dmitri Volkogonov, the chairperson of President Yeltsin's commission for examining the Soviet archives, has been hailed as exposing Lenin's crimes. Volkogonov charges that Lenin's fanaticism caused him to order acts of inhuman cruelty; that he was an agent of the German government; that the October revolution was the coup of a minority; that Lenin was the originator of the idea of a one-party dictatorship; that he persecuted religious believers; and that he (...) created the totalitarian system that was perfected by Stalin. Volkogonov's evidence from archival and other sources is examined, and his charges are found to be unjustified. (shrink)

Written by one of the world's preeminent authorities on Kierkegaard, this 2001 biography was the first to reveal the delicate imbrication of Kierkegaard's life and thought. To grasp the importance and influence of Kierkegaard's thought far beyond his native Denmark, it is necessary to trace the many factors that led this gifted but 'exceedingly childish youth' to grapple with traditional philosophical problems and religious themes in a way that later generations would recognize as amounting to a philosophical revolution. (...) This book offers a powerful narrative account which will be of particular interest to philosophers, literary theorists, intellectual historians, and scholars of religious studies as well as any non-specialist looking for an authoritative guide to the life and work of one of the most original and fascinating figures in Western philosophy. (shrink)

"The day will come when not only my writings, but precisely my life--the intriguing secret of all the machinery--will be studied and studied." Søren Kierkegaard's remarkable combination of genius and peculiarity made this a fair if arrogant prediction. But Kierkegaard's life has been notoriously hard to study, so complex was the web of fact and fiction in his work. Joakim Garff's biography of Kierkegaard is thus a landmark achievement. A seamless blend of history, philosophy, and psychological insight, all conveyed (...) with novelistic verve, this is the most comprehensive and penetrating account yet written of the life and works of the enigmatic Dane who changed the course of intellectual history. Garff portrays Kierkegaard not as the all-controlling impresario behind some of the most important works of modern philosophy and religious thought--books credited with founding existentialism and prefiguring postmodernism--but rather as a man whose writings came to control him. Kierkegaard saw himself as a vessel for his writings, a tool in the hand of God, and eventually as a martyr singled out to call for the end of "Christendom." Garff explores the events and relationships that formed Kierkegaard, including his guilt-ridden relationship with his father, his rivalry with his brother, and his famously tortured relationship with his fiancée Regine Olsen. He recreates the squalor and splendor of Golden Age Copenhagen and the intellectual milieu in which Kierkegaard found himself increasingly embattled and mercilessly caricatured. Acclaimed as a major cultural event on its publication in Denmark in 2000, this book, here presented in an exceptionally crisp and elegant translation, will be the definitive account of Kierkegaard's life for years to come. (shrink)

The “Lives of Great Religious Books” from Princeton University Press is a series with the worthy goal of introducing general readers to major works from many different traditions. The phrase “lives of” indicates that the point is not just to elucidate the work’s meaning but also to trace how it has been interpreted between the time of its composition and the present day. In Richard H. Davis, the author of one previous book on visual culture in India and another (...) dealing with Śaiva ritual, Princeton has found a happy conjunction of scholar and subject matter. To The Bhagavad Gita: A Biography Davis brings years of reflection on the diversity of religious expression in medieval and modern India, and.. (shrink)

The Bhagavadgita: A Biography. By Richard H. Davis. Lives of Great Religious Books. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. Pp. xii + 243. $24.95.

Written by one of the world's preeminent authorities on Kierkegard, this biography is the first to reveal the delicate imbrication of Kierkegard's life and thought. To grasp the importance and influence of Kierkegaard's thought far beyond his native Denmark, it is necessary to trace the many factors that led this gifted but (according to his headmaster) 'exceedingly childish youth' to grapple with traditional philosophical problems and religious themes in a way that later generations would recognize as amounting to (...) a philosophical revolution. Although Kierkegaard's works are widely tapped and cited they are seldom placed in context. Nor is due attention placed to their chronology. However, perhaps more than the work of any other contributor to the Western philosophical tradition, these writings are so closely meshed with the background and details of the author's life that knowledge of this is indispensible to their content. Alastair Hannay solves these problems by following the chronological sequence of events and focusing on the formative stages of his career from the success of his first, pseudonymous work ^Either/Or through to The Sickness Unto Death and Practice in Christianity. This book offers a powerful narrative account which will be of particular interest to philosophers, literary theorists, intellectual historians, and scholars of religious studies as well as any non-specialist looking for an authoritative guide to the life and work of one of the most original and fascinating figures in Western philosophy. Alastair Hannay is Professor Emeritus in the department of philosophy at the University of Oslo. He is the co-editor of The Cambridge Companion of Kierkegaard (1998) and is also translator of several works by Kierkegaard in Penguin Classics. (shrink)

A Platonist philosopher and priest of Apollo at Delphi, Plutarch (ca. 45-120 CE) covers in his vast oeuvre of miscellaneous writings and biographies of great men virtually every aspect of ancient religion, Greek, Roman, Jewish, Egyptian, Persian. This collection of essays takes the reader on a hike through Plutarch's Religious Landscapes offering as a compass the philosopher's considerations on issues of philosophical theology, cult, ethics, politics, natural sciences, hermeneutics, atheism, and life after death. Plutarch provides a unique vantage point (...) to reconstruct and understand many of the interesting developments that were taking in the philosophical and religious world of the first centuries CE. (shrink)

Pre-modern Arabic biography has served as a major source for the history of Islamic civilization. In this 2000 study exploring the origins and development of classical Arabic biography, Michael Cooperson demonstrates how Muslim scholars used the notions of heirship and transmission to document the activities of political, scholarly and religious communities. The author also explains how medieval Arab scholars used biography to tell the life-stories of important historical figures by examining the careers of the Abbasid Caliph (...) al- Ma'mun, the Shiite Imam Ali al-Rida, the Sunni scholar Ahmad Ibn Hanbal and the ascetic Bishr al-Hafi, each of whom represented a tradition of political and spiritual heirship to the Prophet. Drawing on anthropology and comparative religion, as well as history and literary criticism, the book considers how each figure responded to the presence of the others and how these responses were preserved by posterity. (shrink)

This accessible and highly readable book is the first full-length biography of Hegel to be published since the largely outdated treatments of the nineteenth century. Althaus draws on new historical material and scholarly sources about the life and times of this most enigmatic and influential of modern philosophers. He paints a living portrait of a thinker whose personality was more complex than is often imagined, and shows that Hegel's relation to his revolutionary times was also more ambiguous than is (...) usually accepted. Althaus presents a broad chronological narrative of Hegel's development from his early theological studies in Tubingen and the associated unpublished writings, profoundly critical of the established religious orthodoxies. He traces Hegel's years of philosophical apprenticeship with Schelling in Jena as he struggled for an independent intellectual position, up to the crowning period of influence and success in Berlin where Hegel appeared as the advocate of the modern Prussian state. Althaus tells a vivid story of Hegel's life and his intellectual and personal crises, drawing generously on the philosopher's own words from his extensive correspondence. His central role in the cultural and political life of the time is illuminated by the impressions and responses of his contemporaries, such as Schelling, Schleiermacher and Goethe. This panoramic introduction to Hegel's life, work and times will be a valuable resource for scholars, students and anyone interested in this towering figure of philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.1 (2003) 135-136 [Access article in PDF] Alastair Hannay. Kierkegaard: A Biography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xvi + 496. Cloth, $39.95. In the opening pages of this carefully crafted biography, Hannay states that he has no intention of making matters easy for his reader. By this, he means that "final judgments" will not be forthcoming on a number (...) of key issues surrounding Kierkegaard and his works: the nature of his relation to Christianity, the motives leading him to collide with The Corsair, and the meaning and wisdom of his final attack on Bishop Jakob Mynster and the established Danish Church. This is not to say that Hannay presents Kierkegaard either through rose-colored lenses or through narrowly intellectualist ones. Indeed, one of the book's central virtues is that it combines a philosopher's long-standing interest in Kierkegaard's writings with other guiding passions: a fascination with the sources of human creativity, the twists and turns of nineteenth-century European intellectual history, and the drama of one man's sustained grappling with the meaning of (his) life and the degree to which this meaning could be forged and sustained in his own writing.Hannay raises the curtain on Kierkegaard's life at the intellectual debut of the latter. In his first public appearance before the Student Union at the University of Copenhagen, Kierkegaard took issue with a student colleague's espousal of liberal reform. Hannay sees in Kierkegaard's performance signs of things to come: (1) the attempt to gain the notice and approval of the leading cultural lights, such as Danish literary icon Johan Ludvig Heiberg, and (2) a habit of seeking unity and definition through opposition and controversy. In his subsequent discussion of Fear and Trembling, Hannay notes the inescapable fact that Kierkegaard's philosophic positions are often tailor-made justifications for his private [End Page 135] behavior. The classic example is de Silentio's celebration of Abraham's teleological suspension of the ethical, a celebration which would, as often noted, vindicate equally Isaac's sacrifice by Abraham and Regine's "sacrifice" by Kierkegaard. Already on the occasion of his address to the Student Union, Kierkegaard's thought lines up nicely with his self-interest. But Hannay's work is hardly a reductive exposé. His ear for the varied leitmotifs of the authorship, their development and integration, is unrivaled. Regarding Kierkegaard's first skirmish in the academic arena, Hannay alerts his reader to emergent themes: (1) the valorization of personal unity, and the assertion that such unity must emerge from a life rather than be imposed upon it, and (2) a corresponding respect for the power of lived experience and a critique of any life or movement which is either primarily reactive or abstracted from individual existence. While personal unity remains a desideratum throughout his life, the integrity of lived experience is ultimately placed in question by Kierkegaard's construal of Christianity, which he comes increasingly to see as opposed to the humanism which underlies both Enlightened and Romantic thought.Hannay's biography focuses primarily on the development of Kierkegaard's thought as expressed in his journals and published writings. As such, his biography tends to emphasize the continuity of the authorship over its internal tensions. Hannay views, for example, thehumanistic stance of Climacus's Religiousness A as propadeutic to the radical transcendenceof the godhead embraced by Religiousness B. This is a topic open to dispute, since Kierkegaard himself went out of his way to record, and perhaps exhibit, the offensiveness of Christian demands to (fallen) human nature. Hannay acknowledges Kierkegaard's lifelong ambivalencetoward Christianity, but he does not show how this ambivalence echoes in the authorship. Ifhis Kierkegaard is a less divided character than the original, Hannay nevertheless challenges those who would minimize either (1) the depth of Kierkegaard's breach with humanistic thought or (2) the degree to which "the religious life-view [is] persistently in the offing" (Hannay, "Something on Hermeneutics and Communication in Kierkegaard After All," forthcoming in Kierkegaard and the Word, Poul Houe and Gordon D. Marino... (shrink)

"The day will come when not only my writings, but precisely my life--the intriguing secret of all the machinery--will be studied and studied." Søren Kierkegaard's remarkable combination of genius and peculiarity made this a fair if arrogant prediction. But Kierkegaard's life has been notoriously hard to study, so complex was the web of fact and fiction in his work. Joakim Garff's biography of Kierkegaard is thus a landmark achievement. A seamless blend of history, philosophy, and psychological insight, all conveyed (...) with novelistic verve, this is the most comprehensive and penetrating account yet written of the life and works of the enigmatic Dane who changed the course of intellectual history. Garff portrays Kierkegaard not as the all-controlling impresario behind some of the most important works of modern philosophy and religious thought--books credited with founding existentialism and prefiguring postmodernism--but rather as a man whose writings came to control him. Kierkegaard saw himself as a vessel for his writings, a tool in the hand of God, and eventually as a martyr singled out to call for the end of "Christendom." Garff explores the events and relationships that formed Kierkegaard, including his guilt-ridden relationship with his father, his rivalry with his brother, and his famously tortured relationship with his fiancée Regine Olsen. He recreates the squalor and splendor of Golden Age Copenhagen and the intellectual milieu in which Kierkegaard found himself increasingly embattled and mercilessly caricatured. Acclaimed as a major cultural event on its publication in Denmark in 2000, this book, here presented in an exceptionally crisp and elegant translation, will be the definitive account of Kierkegaard's life for years to come. (shrink)

How did Elijah Muhammad's establishment of the Nation of Islam affect the civil rights movement in the United States? Philosophers and Religious Leaders answers that question and others as it presents 200 leaders whose lives and work have greatly influenced the world we live in today. Profiles include: Muhammad Abduh—architect of Islamic modernism. Mary Daly— influential feminist theologian and philosopher. Mary Baker Eddy—founder of Christian Science. Mencius (Meng K'o)—Confucian moral philosopher and interpreter. Shang Yang—Chinese philosopher of legalist school.

The malign figure of the Antichrist endures in modern culture, whether religious or secular; and the spectral shadow he has cast over the ages continues to exert a strong and powerful fascination. Philip C. Almond tells the story of the son of Satan from his early beginnings to the present day, and explores this false Messiah in theology, literature and the history of ideas. Discussing the origins of the malevolent being who at different times was cursed as Belial, Nero (...) or Damien, the author reveals how Christianity in both East and West has imagined this incarnation of absolute evil destined to appear at the end of time. For the better part of the last two thousand years, Almond suggests, the human battle between right and wrong has been envisaged as a mighty cosmic duel between good and its opposite, culminating in an epic final showdown between Christ and his deadly arch-nemesis. (shrink)

The article is devoted to an investigation of the preconditions of Heidegger’s methodological atheism, according to which “philosophy is fundamentally atheistic”. Based on biographical evidence which sheds light on the mental experience of the young philosopher (“darkness of depressive sensitivity”, according to H. Ott) the author maintains that Heidegger was very prejudiced against the Catholic tradition. The author suggests that the origins of Heidegger’s methodology should be sought in the first and most important of the “turns” which took place around (...) 1916, when Heidegger was in deep crisis. Two main components can be distinguished in this religious-philosophical turn: (1) the rejection of Catholicism, linked to a youthful experience of dependence on the church that stretched over decade; (2) the Protestant influence of his wife and teacher (but no less so of Luther and Kierkegaard) along with the existential experience of the First World War, in which Heidegger became involved. As a result, the author concludes that Heidegger chooses philosophy as opposed to theology, which sets up a specific understanding of philosophy and a negative attitude towards theology. According to Heidegger, only by renouncing ungenuine religiosity one can stand honestly before God, but this “purifying atheism” ultimately leads not to God, but to Nothing. (shrink)

Rockefeller (religion and philosophy, Middlebury College) combines biography and intellectual history in an introduction to the philosophy of Dewey (1859-1952) which emphasizes the evolution of the religious faith and moral vision at the heart of his thought. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Po.