In this revision of a seminal work, O'Donovan describes the shape of a Christian moral theology which has wide implications for creation, history, knowledge, freedom, and authority--his purpose being to outline a system of theological ethics and to describe the nature of the moral response within redeemed creation: acts of surrender, obedience, and love.

Knowledge aims to fit the world, and action to change it. In this collection of essays, Onora O'Neill explores the relationship between these concepts and shows that principles are not enough for ethical thought or action: we also need to understand how practical judgement identifies ways of enacting them and of changing the way things are. Both ethical and technical judgement are supported, she contends, by bringing to bear multiple considerations, ranging from ethical principles to real-world constraints, and while we (...) will never find practical algorithms - let alone ethical algorithms - that resolve moral and political issues, good practical judgement can bring abstract principles to bear in situations that call for action. Her essays thus challenge claims that all inquiry must use either the empirical methods of scientific inquiry or the interpretive methods of the humanities. They will appeal to a range of readers in moral and political philosophy. (shrink)

Revealing flaws in both 'green' and market-based approaches to environmental policy, O'Neill develops an Aristotolian account of well-being. He examines the implications for wider issues involving markets, civil society an.

In this book Anthony O’Hear examines the reasons that are given for religious faith. His approach is firmly within the classical tradition of natural theology, but an underlying theme is the differences between the personal Creator of the Bible or the Koran and a God conceived of as the indeterminate ground of everything determinate. Drawing on several religious traditions and on the resources of contemporary philosophy, specific chapters analyse the nature of religious faith and of religious experience. They examine connections (...) between religion and morality, and religion and human knowledge – the cosmological, teleological and ontological arguments, process thought, and the problem that evil presents for religion. The final chapter returns to the inherently dogmatic nature of religious faith and concludes that rational people should look beyond religion for the fulfilment of their spiritual needs. (shrink)

Why did the omnipotent, omniscient, unsurpassably, and perfectly good being who is necessary in Himself, and having a supremely rational will, contingently create ex nihilo? What motivation could account for such freely undertaken activity, displaying it as neither necessary nor less than fully rational? The chapter considers and criticizes answers recently offered by Mark Johnston and Alex Pruss. It is argued that creation of some contingent reality or other is necessary, and that plausible reflections on the ordered complexity in God’s (...) motivations indicate that the scope of contingency regarding what to create is highly constricted—though not to the point of complete modal collapse. A perfect creator would create either an infinite and richly varied multiverse or an infinitely improving universe realizing a wide array of kinds of goods. Finally, a rebuttal is given to the contention that any element of contingency in a divine choice entails a rational-explanatory deficiency. (shrink)

Ned O'Gorman's Politics for Everybody is, at its core, a defense of politics for our polarized times. In an accessible and impassioned style, O'Gorman argues for a political middle ground, which is not aligned with any particular party or ideology, but which embraces the worth, value, and importance of politics itself. Inspired by Hannah Arendt, O'Gorman shows how political thinking is rooted in common sense and everyday experiences, and is rooted in all of us, even and especially when politics is (...) the last thing we want to talk about. Resisting the deadening of political experience by the bombast of contemporary media, the impoverishment of public discourse, and the low-minded violence of smear campaigns, O'Gorman calls for a purer, simpler relation to politics, one that does justice to the virtues of open, honest exchange, which can be critical without being hateful. Politics for Everybody is, in short, a defense of the dignity of politics in the age of its infamy, and a plea for the notion that to give politics a thinking chance, we must take it more seriously, not write it off. (shrink)

The phenomenon of action in which the mind moves the body has puzzled philosophers over the centuries. In this new edition of a classic work of analytical philosophy, Brian O'Shaughnessy investigates bodily action and attempts to resolve some of the main problems. His expanded and updated discussion examines the scope of the will and the conditions in which it makes contact with the body, and investigates the epistemology of the body. He sheds light upon the strangely intimate relation of awareness (...) in which we stand to our own bodies, doing so partly through appeal to the concept of the body-image. The result is a new and strengthened emphasis on the vitally important function of the bodily will as a transparently intelligible bridge between mind and body, and the proposal of a dual aspect theory of the will. (shrink)

I am working on a substantially revised second edition of this. It is due to be published by Palgrave in 2024.

Edmund Burke, long considered modern conservatism's founding father, is also widely believed to be an opponent of empire. However, Daniel O'Neill turns that latter belief on its head. This fresh and innovative book shows that Burke was a passionate supporter and staunch defender of the British Empire in the eighteenth century, whether in the New World, India, or Ireland. Moreover--and against a growing body of contemporary scholarship that rejects the very notion that Burke was an exemplar of conservatism--O'Neill demonstrates that (...) Burke's defense of empire was in fact ideologically consistent with his conservative opposition to the French Revolution. Burke's logic of empire relied on two opposing but complementary theoretical strategies: Ornamentalism, which stressed cultural similarities between "civilized" societies, as he understood them, and Orientalism, which stressed the putative cultural differences distinguishing "savage" societies from their "civilized" counterparts. This incisive book also shows that Burke's argument had lasting implications, as his development of these two justifications for empire prefigured later intellectual defenses of British imperialism"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Sensationism, a philosophy that gained momentum in the French Enlightenment as a response to Lockean empiricism, was acclaimed by Hippolyte Taine as "the doctrine of the most lucid, methodical, and French minds to have honored France." The first major general study in English of eighteenth-century French sensationism, _The Authority of Experience_ presents the history of a complex set of ideas and explores their important ramifications for literature, education, and moral theory. The study begins by presenting the main ideas of sensationist (...) philosophers Condillac, Bonnet, and Helvétius, who held that all of our ideas come to us through the senses. The experience of the body in seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching enabled individuals, as John C. O'Neal points out, to challenge the sometimes arbitrary authority of institutions and people in positions of power. After a general introduction to sensationism, the author develops a theory of sensationist aesthetics that not only reveals the interconnections of the period's philosophy and literature but also enhances our awareness of the forces at work in the French novel. He goes on to examine the relations between sensationism and eighteenth-century French educational theory, materialism, and _idéologie_. Ultimately, O'Neal opens a discussion of the implications of sensationist thought for issues of particular concern to society today. (shrink)

In this important new book, David O'Connor discusses both logical and empirical forms of the problem of inscrutable evil, perennially the most difficult philosophical problem confronting theism. Arguing that both a version of theism and a version of atheism are justified on the evidence in the debate over God and evil, O'Connor concludes that a warranted outcome is a philosophical dètente between those two positions. On the way to that conclusion he develops two arguments from evil, a reformed version of (...) the logical argument and an indirect version of the empirical argument, and deploys both against a central formulation of theism that he describes as orthodox theism. God and Inscrutable Evil makes a valuable contribution to contemporary debates in the philosophy of religion. (shrink)

First published in 1988, the aim of this book can be stated in Nietzsche’s words: ‘To look at science from the perspective of the artist, but at art from that of life’. The title contests the notions that science alone can provide us with the most objective truth about the world, and that artistic endeavour can produce nothing more valuable than entertainment. O’Hear argues that art and the study of art are not indispensable aspects of human life, and that this (...) is equally as important as the investigation of the natural world. (shrink)

Review of the Mongolian Buddhist literature and terminologies.

"מהדורה מוערת ומבוארת של ספר מגלה טמירין על פי דפוס ראשון, כתבי יד מפוזרים, והשוואה לנוסח הספר ביידיש. לספר נלווה כרך מיוחד של נספחים שנוגעים להתהוות הספר ולתכניו, וכלולים בו דיונים עקרוניים שקשורים לכמה סוגיות שעולות בו: מדרש השמות המוצפנים, מקורותיו החסידיים של המחבר, הנוסחים השונים בכתב-יד, והנוסח המיוחד של הספר ביידיש" -- מעטפת אחורית.

Theorists of the Russian conservatism have made a considerable contribution to the development of axiology, the philosophy of history and comparativistics. In their studies of the local civilisations existing at different times and at different places they have focused on the dynamics of their origin, development, collapse or transformation into new civilisational forms. The best known slavophiles such as A. Khomyakov, K. Axakov, I. Kireyevskiy saw the mission of the Russian civilisation in synthesising Europe and Russia which has preserved the (...) true Christianity – the Orthodoxy. According to N. Danilevskiy, the founder of the culturohistorical school of thought, Europe has an irreconcilable hostility towards Russia. He proves that Europe and Russia are two different culturohistoricaltypes (local civilisations). He understood Russia’s mission as that of unification of Slavic peoples. K. Leontiev develops the so-called theory of Byzantism, according to which the West is doomed and Russia will be saved thanks to its Orthodoxy and the oriental despotism underlying its statehood. He advocates a merger between Russian and oriental traditions. From the point of view of the proponents of the Eurasian theory such as P. Savitskiy, N. Trubetskoy, etc., the merger has already occurred, so Russians should be viewed as Eurasians and Russia as a Eurasian civilisation. Russian thinkers were criticising the so-called Eurocentrism in their efforts to prove that progress should be measured not only by the accumulation of material wealth, but also by the development of various spiritual aspects of human beings. The anthroposociogenesis does not have any predetermined patterns, its development is of co-evolutionary, often broken, discrete nature. (shrink)