By David Cooper
David Cooper explores and defends the view truth self reliant of human views is unavoidably indescribable, a "mystery." different perspectives are proven to be hubristic. Humanists, for whom "man is the degree" of fact, exaggerate our ability to reside with out the experience of an self sufficient degree. Absolutists, who proclaim our capability to grasp an self sufficient truth, exaggerate our cognitive powers. during this hugely unique ebook Cooper restores to philosophy a formal appreciation of mystery-that is what presents a degree of our ideals and behavior.
Read or Download The Measure of Things: Humanism, Humility, and Mystery PDF
Similar mysticism books
The Measure of Things: Humanism, Humility, and Mystery
David Cooper explores and defends the view fact autonomous of human views is inevitably indescribable, a "mystery. " different perspectives are proven to be hubristic. Humanists, for whom "man is the degree" of fact, exaggerate our means to stay with no the experience of an autonomous degree.
"Henry Corbin's works are the simplest advisor to the visionary culture. .. . Corbin, like Scholem and Jonas, is remembered as a student of genius. He used to be uniquely built not just to recuperate Iranian Sufism for the West, but additionally to protect the primary Western traditions of esoteric spirituality. "--From the creation by means of Harold BloomIbn 'Arabi (1165-1240) used to be one of many nice mystics of all time.
Teachings of the Hindu Mystics
This anthology collects the main lyrical, passionate, illuminating writings of the Hindu mystical culture. Andrew Harvey, the preferred religious pupil and author, has chosen excerpts from historic and modern resources, together with extracts from the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, and different classical Hindu texts; the phrases of such venerable non secular academics as Ramakrishna and Ramana Maharshi; and the devotional poetry of Mirabai, Ramprasad, and so forth.
- Love, Soul & Freedom: Dancing With Rumi on the Mystic Path
- In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis
- School of Out-of-Body Travel
- Beelzebub's tales to his grandson : an objectively impartial criticism of the life of man
Additional resources for The Measure of Things: Humanism, Humility, and Mystery
Sample text
26 'SELF-ASSERTION' expression. If the world is created by a demiurge whose intentions are at best dubious, it is not a place that 'emanates' from the divine 'One', imbued with a logos which renders it a harmonious, benign, rational, and knowable whole. It is a place, rather, deserving of contempt. As for 'the true God', he is, since 'alien to' the world, a being knowable, if at all, only through an occult insight remote from ordinary reason. I referred just now to the most famous expression of the synthesis of monotheism and Greek philosophy, and intended, of course, the writings of a man who, ironically, had been strongly attracted to gnostic ideas in his youth—St Augustine.
Under the 'anthropocentric illusion', moreover, the usual stance towards the natural world, pace recent environmentalist orthodoxy, was not an 'interventionist' one, but a quietistic confidence that, left alone, nature would work for the good of those creatures for whom, after all, it had been designed. As for 'science', this was something which, by the terms of the doctrine of 'divine ideas', was at best redundant, at worst offensive. Redundant, because the big truths which mattered were to be arrived at by contemplation, revelation, and reason, not by experiment and observation.
During William of Ockham's last years, and for many to come, he and his followers experienced censorship and persecution. The scholastic philosophy which was achieving a dominance symbolized by Aquinas's canonization in 1323 was precisely the aristotelianized theology that 'Ockhamist' tenets challenged. Even at the high noon of Renaissance hostility to scholasticism, this was the philosophy predominantly taught in the universities of Europe, its critics being, for the most part, outside the precincts of academia.