Thomas Berry had a gentle yet mesmerizing and luminescent presence that was evident to anyone who spent time with him. His intellectual scope and erudite manner were compelling, and the breadth, depth, clarity, and elegance of his vision was breathtaking. Berry was an intellectual giant and cultural visionary of extraordinary stature. Thomas Berry’s vast knowledge of history, religions, and cultural histories is a unique blend revealing a genuine, original thinker. The ecological crisis, in all its manifestations, came to dominate Berry’s concerns. He perceived that the greatest need was to offer the possibility of a viable future for an Earth community. Many know of his proposal for a functional cosmology, the need for a new story, and a vital Earth sensitive spirituality. Few know of his rich and varied intellectual journey. The Intellectual Journey of Thomas Berry: Imagining the Earth Community is about the roots and insights hidden within his ecological, spiritual proposal. These essays, written by experts on Thomas Berry’s work, probe into, and reveal distinct themes that permeate his work, in gratitude for his contribution to the Earth.

The final legacy of the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Labyrinth of Solitude Itinerary records the evolution of the political ideas of Octavio Paz, the great Mexican writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. It is an intellectual autobiography, in a sense, but also a sentimental and even passionate one. In his thoughts Paz realized the past was inseparable from the present. And so he tells the story of his journey through time, from youth to adulthood. It is not a straight line, nor is it a circle; it is instead a spiral that turns ceaselessly over, bringing into view a time seventy years in the past and the actions of today. It is the final work by a great thinker and a magnificent writer.

A commonly held impression is that Pope Francis is a compassionate shepherd and determined leader but that he lacks the intellectual depth of his recent predecessors. Massimo Borghesi’s The Mind of Pope Francis: Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s Intellectual Journey dismantles that image. Borghesi recounts and analyzes, for the first time, Bergoglio’s intellectual formation, exploring the philosophical, theological, and spiritual principles that support the profound vision at the heart of this pope’s teaching and ministry. Central to that vision is the church as a coincidentia oppositorum, holding together what might seem to be opposing and irreconcilable realities. Among his guiding lights have been the Jesuit saints, Ignatius and Peter Faber; philosophers Gaston Fessard, Romano Guardini, and Alberto Methol Ferrer; and theologians Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar. Recognizing how these various strands have come together to shape the mind and heart of Jorge Mario Bergoglio offers essential insights into who he is and the way he is leading the church. Notably, this groundbreaking book is informed by four interviews provided to the author, via audio recordings, by the pope himself on his own intellectual formation, major portions of which are published here for the first time.

This multi-diciplinary and inter-diciplinary work presents the rethinking of the entire tradition of Islamic philosophical psychology by Mulla Sadra on the most profound questions and issues pertaining to the soul. It includes the views of the ancient Greek philosophers and physicians, Muslim philosophers, theologians, Sufis, theosophists and physicians, the teachings of the Qur'an the Traditions of the Prophets and the Shi'ite Imams and Mulla Sadra's own profound insights and intellectual elucidations combined with impeccable logical proofs and demonstration. It deals with the definition of the soul, the proof of its existence, its birth as corporeal and its survival as spiritual, various levels of the soul and the body, the vertical development of the soul through its substantial motion, the soul-body relation, the holistic approach to psychosomatic diseases, the resurrection and post-mortem survival of the soul, the body of the resurrection, his original interpretation of metempsychosis, the meaning of Heaven and Hell and the intellectual or spirituas worlds beyond this world. The central issue in this work is self-knowledge. The human soul is created in the Image of God with a purpose. This image comes to full actualization through self-knowledge, which according to Mulla Sadra is the key to knowledge of God, the Day of Resurrection and the Return of all creatures to God.

The intellectual autobiography of an economist influential in both command economies and free market economies that discusses his life, work, and the social and political environment during the Second World War, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and its aftermath, and the post-socialist transition.

This book examines Augustine's intellectual conversion from Platonism to Christianity, as described at Confessions 7.9.13-21.27. It is widely assumed that this occurred in the summer of 386, shortly before Augustine's volitional conversion in the garden at Milan. Brian Dobell argues, however, that Augustine's intellectual conversion did not occur until the mid-390s, and develops this claim by comparing Confessions 7.9.13-21.27 with a number of important passages and themes from Augustine's early writings. He thus invites the reader to consider anew the problem of Augustine's conversion in 386: was it to Platonism or Christianity? His original and important study will be of interest to a wide range of readers in the history of philosophy and the history of theology.

For more than fifty years, Geoffrey Hartman has been a pivotal figure in the humanities. In his first book, in 1954, he helped establish the study of Romanticism as key to the problems of modernity. Later, his writings were crucial to the explosive developments in literary theory in the late seventies, and he was a pioneer in Jewish studies, trauma studies, and studies of the Holocaust. At Yale, he was a founder of its Judaic Studies program, as well as of the first major video archive for Holocaust testimonies. Generations of students have benefited from Hartman’s generosity, his penetrating and incisive questioning, the wizardry of his close reading, and his sense that the work of a literary scholar, no less than that of an artist, is a creative act. All these qualities shine forth in this intellectual memoir, which will stand as his autobiography. Hartman describes his early education, uncanny sense of vocation, and development as a literary scholar and cultural critic. He looks back at how his career was influenced by his experience, at the age of nine, of being a refugee from Nazi Germany in the Kindertransport. He spent the next six years at school in England, where he developed his love of English literature and the English countryside, before leaving to join his mother in America. Hartman treats us to a “biobibliography” of his engagements with the major trends in literary criticism. He covers the exciting period at Yale handled so controversially by the media and gives us vivid portraits, in particular, of Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida. All this is set in the context of his gradual self-awareness of what scholarship implies and how his personal displacements strengthened his calling to mediate between European and American literary cultures. Anyone looking for a rich, intelligible account of the last half-century of combative literary studies will want to read Geoffrey Hartman’s unapologetic scholar’s tale.