Following Credit and Faith and Economic Theology, this third volume in the series develops a metaphysics which is missing when trust is ordered around economic theories and institutions. Human existence may be conceived according to its temporal dimensions of appropriation, participation, and offering. Engaging with the Western philosophical tradition from the Neo-Pythagoreans and Plato to Heidegger and Arendt, drawing especially from Augustine and Weil, Goodchild offers striking reconstructions of the meanings of economic, political and religious dimensions of life. The outcome is an elaboration of conceptions of wealth, power, contingency, necessity and grace which give a new orientation to human life and endeavour. Goodchild situates this discussion within the current historical era of the breakdown of global financial capitalism. He draws from the Financial Revolution in England as a time of crisis which illuminates our own. Faced with a range of global crises, Goodchild proposes an alternative between strategies for survival: either submission before a Great Machine of Credit as an autonomous, unthinking system for regulating human behaviour or accession to the necessity of grace as a way of empowering the pursuit of wealth, justice and thought.

This book provides the foundations of trust amidst radical uncertainty. Specifically, it addresses the question of under what condition it is possible to trust relative strangers. As the first logical investigation of its kind, the book breaks with many preconceived ideas we have about trust and the scientific method that leads to its clarification. It builds on the insight that, contrary to widespread belief, it is not risk but freedom that is most fundamental for explaining trust. In fact, trust is the giving of freedom, out of freedom, and one’s consciousness of the potential risks involved merely disturbs one’s ability to trust. The book makes the twofold normative claim that any legitimate scientific preoccupation with trust must necessarily include the concept of freedom in its account, and that theories of trust that run against the logical prerequisites of freedom are a-priori falsified. It presents a theoretical proposal that makes sure that trust, instead of being constructed as a passive and functional “illusion” of natural love, is understood as the necessary product of an active reason that is oriented towards developing human autonomy.

Trust is central to our social lives. We know by trusting what others tell us. We act on that basis, and on the basis of trust in their promises and implicit commitments. So trust underpins both epistemic and practical cooperation and is key to philosophical debates on the conditions of its possibility. It is difficult to overstate the significance of these issues. On the practical side, discussions of cooperation address what makes society possible-of how it is that life is not a Hobbesian war of all against all. On the epistemic side, discussions of cooperation address what makes the pooling of knowledge possible-and so the edifice that is science. But trust is not merely central to our lives instrumentally; trusting relations are themselves of great value, and in trusting others, we realise distinctive forms of value. What are these forms of value, and how is trust central to our lives? These questions are explored and developed in this volume, which collects fifteen new essays on the philosophy of trust. They develop and extend existing philosophical discussion of trust and will provide a reference point for future work on trust.

"A departure at right angles to thinking in the modern Western world. An important, original work, that should get the widest possible hearing" (Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and his Emissary) Middle Way Philosophy is not about compromise, but about the avoidance of dogma and the integration of conflicting assumptions. To rely on experience as our guide, we need to avoid the interpretation of experience through unnecessary dogmas. Drawing on a range of influences in Buddhist practice, Western philosophy and psychology, Middle Way Philosophy questions alike the assumptions of scientific naturalism, religious revelation and political absolutism, trying to separate what addresses experience in these doctrines from what is merely assumed. This Omnibus edition of Middle Way Philosophy includes all four of the volumes previously published separately: 1. The Path of Objectivity, 2. The Integration of Desire, 3. The Integration of Meaning, and 4. The Integration of Belief.

This first book-length work of the prominent German philosopher Gunter Figal to appear in English offers a radical defense of metaphysical philosophy in the era of postmodern thought. For Figal, metaphysics does not represent an anachronistic and pernicious mode of thought that ought to be overcome but rather is a type of thinking that proceeds from a recognition of the necessary coherence of everything with its opposite. It is this agonistic relationship of opposites that Figal, following Heraclitus, terms strife. Rather than regarding the conflict of opposites as necessarily resulting in the dissolution of meaning and sense, as many contemporary thinkers maintain, Figal contends that sense and meaning can only come into existence metaphysically, that is to say, as a consequence of strife. And, the context within which strife occurs is freedom. Using these concepts of strife and freedom, Figal proposes new and provocative readings of Plato, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard, as well as of some of the most controversial figures of twentieth-century philosophy.

The Irish philosopher William Desmond is one of the most compelling and adventurous Christian thinkers of our time. The essays gathered here undertake a journey through the Bible with Desmond that ranges across biblical theology, philosophy of religion, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, political theory, and literary studies. Some of the essays examine the place of the Bible in Desmond's thought, considering his readings of the creation, the Abraham cycle, and the Beatitudes. Other essays bring Desmond's ideas to bear on broad questions that emerge from the Bible about philosophy and revelation, exegesis, theopoetics, eschatology, and tyranny. Still others bring Desmond into conversation with influential philosophers who engage (or conspicuously do not engage) the Bible, such as Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Tillich. Together, these essays show the rich possibilities of approaching the Bible with Desmond. All take their bearings from Desmond's "metaxological" approach, which does not seek to claim the final word, which attends to the text rather than simply imposing on it, and which allows for an ongoing dialogue. / Contributors: Ryan G. Duns, SJ / Caitlin Smith Gilson / Joseph K. Gordon / William Christian Hackett / Steven E. Knepper / Renee Kohler-Ryan / Andrew Kuiper / Brendan Thomas Sammon / Terence Sweeney / Ethan Vanderleek / Erik van Versendaal / Robert Wyllie

Faith occupies an important place in human lives. It can be directed towards God, friends, political systems and sports teams, and is said to help people through crises and to motivate people to achieve life goals. But what is faith? Philosophers and theologians have, for centuries, been concerned with questions about the rationality of faith, but more recently, have focussed on what kind of psychological attitude faith is. The authors of this book bring together, for the first time, the different elements of this recent debate, staking out the different positions and arguments, and defending a novel ‘true grit’ theory of faith, from which the rationality and language of faith are addressed from a fresh perspective. The book engages with a range of questions about the nature of faith, including: Does faith require belief? Is faith motivational? What is the relationship between faith, trust and hope? Do expressions of faith aim at the truth? And, in what sense is faith resilient? The authors defend a distinctive conception of faith involving resistance to psychological, practical and epistemic challenges, from which a novel account of the psychology and epistemology of faith is developed. The treatment of the topic draws extensively on the philosophy of mind, language and religion, and provides a map of this exciting field of study for newcomers to the philosophy of faith. A Philosophy of Faith will appeal to researchers and advanced students in philosophy of religion, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and epistemology who are interested in the topic of faith.

In Around the Day in Eighty Worlds Martin Savransky calls for a radical politics of the pluriverse amid the ongoing devastation of the present. Responding to an epoch marked by the history of colonialism and ecological devastation, Savransky draws on the pragmatic pluralism of William James to develop what Savransky calls a “pluralistic realism”—an understanding of the world as simultaneously one and many, ongoing and unfinished, underway and yet to be made. Savransky explores the radical multifariousness of reality by weaving key aspects of James's thought together with divergent worlds and stories: of Magellan's circumnavigation, sorcery in Mozambique, God's felt presence among a group of evangelicals in California, visible spirits in Zambia, and ghosts in the wake of the 2011 tsunami in Japan. Throughout, he experiments with these storied worlds to dramatize new ways of approaching the politics of radical difference and the possibility of transforming reality. By exploring and constructing relations between James's pluralism and the ontological turn in anthropology, Savransky offers a new conceptualization of the pluriverse that fosters modes of thinking and living otherwise.