Search results for ""Author Stephen Mulhall""

Did post-Enlightenment philosophers reject the idea of original sin and hence the view that life is a quest for redemption from it? In Philosophical Myths of the Fall, Stephen Mulhall identifies and evaluates a surprising ethical-religious dimension in the work of three highly influential philosophers--Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. He asks: Is the Christian idea of humanity as structurally flawed something that these three thinkers aim simply to criticize? Or do they, rather, end up by reproducing secular variants of the same mythology? Mulhall argues that each, in different ways, develops a conception of human beings as in need of redemption: in their work, we appear to be not so much capable of or prone to error and fantasy, but instead structurally perverse, living in untruth. In this respect, their work is more closely aligned to the Christian perspective than to the mainstream of the Enlightenment. However, all three thinkers explicitly reject any religious understanding of human perversity; indeed, they regard the very understanding of human beings as originally sinful as central to that from which we must be redeemed. And yet each also reproduces central elements of that understanding in his own thinking; each recounts his own myth of our Fall, and holds out his own image of redemption. The book concludes by asking whether this indebtedness to religion brings these philosophers' thinking closer to, or instead forces it further away from, the truth of the human condition.

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Although Heidegger's writings are not extensively concerned with the analysis of political concepts or with advocating particular arrangements of political institutions, his basic way of understanding the human relation to the world accords a constitutive significance to its social, cultural and historical dimensions. There is thus a political aspect to his thinking about every philosophical matter to which he turns his attention. This collection of essays is designed to identify, contextualize and critically evaluate the main phases of his intellectual development from that perspective.

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A personal glimpse inside the mind of a leading philosopher The Cavell Reader is an introduction to one of the 20th century's most influential American philosophers. Stanley Cavell was well-known for the broad scope of his writing, which is a major theme of this book; topics include aesthetics, psychoanalysis, film theory, literary criticism, religion, Austin, Emerson, Wittgenstein, and more. Presented in a sequence that illustrates Cavell's evolution of thought through key periods and phases, these pieces provide an overview of the man behind the words, and serve as an introduction to his more famous philosophical work.

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J. M. Coetzee's 'Jesus' Trilogy extends and intensifies his long-term interest in engaging with a wide range of texts, themes and assumptions that help constitute the history of Western European philosophy. In this commentary, Stephen Mulhall extends his own earlier work on Coetzee's previous stagings of the ancient quarrel between philosophy and literature by identifying and following out various ways in which the 'Jesus' Trilogy activates and interrogates themes drawn from Wittgenstein's later philosophy. These themes include rival conceptions of counting and reading, the relation between concepts and wider forms of life, and the intertwined fate of philosophy, literature and religion in a resolutely secular world. In these ways, Wittgenstein's, and so Coetzee's, visions of the world disclose their uncanny intimacy with issues and values central to the critique of modernity elaborated in the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre.

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This is a substantially updated edition of the established guide to this key debate in modern political philosophy.

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