Search results for ""Author Glenn Hughes""

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 explicit recognition and symbolization of transcendent meaning originally occurred in a few advanced civilizations worldwide during the first millennium. 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 and assists 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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Edited by veteran Czech diplomat and senior religion scholar Glenn Hughes, The Presence of the Past presents new insights from a conference hosted by the Václav Havel Program for Human Rights and Diplomacy at Florida International University, in cooperation with the Czech non-profit organization Post Bellum and the Vaclav Havel Library. Its fundamental topic is memory, the human capacity to retain its contents in the flux of time, which is explored and discussed both theoretically and in terms of current action-oriented public discourse.The distinguished group of philosophers, theologians, political scientists, historians, journalists, and political activists who contributed to this volume share their perspectives on pressing issues in the modern world, at the nexus of politics and philosophy. This book’s most central goal is to bring together those who are used to operating in the realm of ideas, in the so-called “ivory tower,” and those who work on the ground—sharp observers of human matters, trained to study them from different perspectives and exposed in their daily lives to the practical problems connected with our capacities of memory, individual or collective. The aim of this dialogue and communication is to open a path to a new beginning. A postscript tries to demonstrate that such an encounter is truly possible; that it can even be productive, and make a good deal of sense.

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Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu—In Search of Lost Time—is one of the most important and influential novels of the modern era. In recent decades, Proust has enjoyed a new surge of critical attention, as well as a sustained growth in readership—well beyond that of other prose masters of twentieth century modernism such as Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, and Beckett. The MLA Bibliography presently lists over 3,000 citations to scholarly works devoted to Proust’s novel, and if one Googles “Proust,” the number of hits exceeds 2,000,000. The temporal nature of human existence and consciousness is one of the many themes explored in In Search of Lost Time, and it is this dimension of Proust’s work that unifies this collection of essays that grew from a roundtable discussion entitled “The Timelessness of Proust” conducted at the 31st annual meeting of the Eric Voegelin Society. The collection includes the following essays: “In Search of Lost Time: Biographies of Consciousness,” Charles R. Embry “Proust, Transcendence, and Metaxic Existence,” Glenn Hughes “The Normative Flow of Consciousness and the Self: A Philosophical Meditation on Proust’s In Search of Lost Time,” Thomas J. McPartland; “Imprisonment and Freedom: Resisting and Embracing the Tension of Existence in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time,” Paulette Kidder; “Proust’s Luminous Memory and L’Homme Éternel: The Quest for Limitless Meaning,” Michael Henry “Unsought Revelations of Eternal Reality in Eliot’s Four Quartets and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time,” Glenn Hughes Persons who are interested not only in the philosophical importance of literary masterworks and in how the philosophical thought of Eric Voegelin may illuminate them, but also in letting Proust serve as a guide in the exploration and understanding of their own lives, will find these essays to be of lasting interest and value.

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