Sophos Ontology: On Post-Traditional Spirituality discusses religious plurality and post-traditional perspectives on emergent forms of sacred sensibility, particularly for those identifying as “spiritual but not religious.” This book is divided into three parts. The first part is a retrospective account of multiple religious traditions, with emphasis on esoteric thought as influenced by mystical writings, covering western, eastern, and Native American traditions. The second part discusses the need for a new conceptualization of the “sacred” as expressed through multiple spiritual perspectives relevant to a pansentient, post-traditional process ontology. Other topics in this section include the importance of an ethically shaped spirituality, collective influences, dreams, imagination, and the role of pluralism in shaping beliefs. Part three explores the role of faith, redefined as spiritual commitment, mysticism as direct experiential knowledge, and transpersonal theory influenced by comparative studies in altered states of consciousness, paranormal research, and the metaphysics of discovery — all contributing to the development of present and future spirituality.

This study forms part of a wider investigation whieh will inquire into the relationship of Ontology and Anthropology. Since the meaning of the term 'ontology' is far from clear, the immediate task is to ask the 'father of ontology' what he might have understood it to mean. The introductory chapter emphasizes the fact that Aristotle hirnself never used the term 'ontology. ' It should be stressed at once that, even had be used it, he could not very weH have employed it to denote the discipline of ontology. For it was only during the era of the schoolmen that the vast and rich body of the prote philosophia came to be disciplined into classifications; these classifications reflected the Christian, - not the pagan Greek -, view of all-that-is. The metaphysica specialis dealing with God (theology), his creatures (psychology), and the created universe (cosmology), was differentiated from the metaphysica generalis, dealing with being-in-general (ens commune). This latter discipline amounted to the 'discipline of ontology'. 1 We are not concemed with the meaning of the metaphysica generalis. We wish to approach our problem with an open mind and want to hear directly from Aristotle - on the basis of the text of the prote Philosophia alone - which body of thought he might have called his 'ontology' and what its meaning might have been.

Heidegger, Ethics and the Practice of Ontology presents an important new examination of ethics and ontology in Heidegger. There remains a basic conviction throughout Heidegger's thought that the event by which Being is given or disclosed is somehow 'prior' to our relation to the many beings we meet in our everyday lives. This priority makes it possible to talk about Being 'as such'. It also sanctions the relegation of ethics to a secondary position with respect to ontology. However, Heidegger's acknowledgement that ontology itself must remain intimately bound to concrete existence problematises the priority accorded to the ontological dimension. David Webb takes this bond as a key point of reference and goes on to develop critical perspectives that open up from within Heidegger's own thought, particularly in relation to Heidegger's debt to Aristotelian physics and ethics. Webb examines the theme of continuity and its role in the constitution of the 'as such' in Heidegger's ontology and argues that to address ontology is to engage in an ethical practice and vice versa.

Metaphysics or Ontology? treats the evolution of the object of metaphysics from being, to the concept of being, to, finally, the object (thought). Possible being must be non-contradictory, but an object of thought includes anything a human being can think, including contradictions and nothingness. When the concept of being, or object of thought, replaces existence as the object of metaphysics, it becomes something other than metaphysics—ontology, or something beyond ontology. However, ontology cannot examine existence because it only investigates concepts and possibility. Only classical metaphysics investigates reality qua reality. This book masterfully treats the history of this controversy and many other important metaphysical questions raised over the centuries

Alain Badiou's work in philosophy, though daunting, has gained a receptive and steadily growing Anglophone readership. What is not well known is the extent to which Badiou's positions, vis-à-vis ontology, ethics, politics and the very meaning of philosophy, were hammered out in dispute with the late Jean-François Lyotard. Matthew R. McLennan's Philosophy, Sophistry, Antiphilosophy is the first work to pose the question of the relation between Lyotard and Badiou, and in so doing constitutes a significant intervention in the field of contemporary European philosophy by revisiting one of its most influential and controversial forefathers. Badiou himself has underscored the importance of Lyotard for his own project; might the recent resurgence of interest in Lyotard be tied in some way to Badiou's comments? Or deeper still: might not Badiou's philosophical Platonism beg an encounter with philosophy's other, the figure of the sophist that Lyotard played so often and so ably? Posing pertinent questions and opening new discursive channels in the literature on these two major figures this book is of interest to those studying philosophy, rhetoric, literary theory, cultural and media studies.

"It is by all means a dubious thing to depend and rest on what an author himself has brought to the forefront. The important thing is rather to give attention to those things he left shrouded in silence." Such was the methodological advice, given in 1924 by Heidegger himself, that is rigorously followed in this book, Heidegger and the Project of Fundamental Ontology. The project involves the vast complex of problems that emerged around Being and Time (1927) and then continued from the time of the Marburg lecture courses (1923-1928) up to the Freiburg lectures (1928-1935), today available in the Gesamtausgabe. Heidegger's silence concerning some of his foundational sources is a fact fully recognized by those who have carefully read him. This book systematically explores and critically assesses the silences concerning Husserl, the Aristotle of Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics, the Hegel of Phenomenology, Nietzsche, and even Descartes. What emerges is a systematic and original reinterpretation of 'fundamental ontology' focused on the self-understanding of the human Dasein as the key for understanding the various meanings of Being and the entire deconstructed history of ontology. The project culminated in the pretensions to absoluteness rampant in modern metaphysics, with its peak and paroxysm to be found in The Introduction to Metaphysics (1935). In regard to the 'Heidegger affair', this book, which was begun well before the present turmoil, shows both the ambiguity and coherence of Heidegger's involvement with the Nazis, and, for the first time, exposes the work of the young Heidegger to a rigorous and wholesome internal criticism. By delineating the origins, the shifts, and the final outcome from within his own field, phenomenology, it allows us to reflect on this difficult question at its depth and origin.

Every human being is born and has gone through a process of birth. This book explores how imagery is used in religious, secular, and nonreligious ways during the contemporary rituals of birth, through analysis of a wide variety of art, iconography, poetry, and material culture.