When we hear the term "Japanese philosophy" we think of Zen Buddhism or the Shinto scriptures. Yet one of the great 20th century interpreters of Western philosophy, Nishida Kitaro, lived and wrote in the Japanese islands all his life, laboring at an ultimate synthesis of oriental thought and Western hermeneutics. To be sure, Nishida's aim was to understand his own cultural influences in relation to the Western world. What distinguished him, however, was his passion for rendering oriental metaphysics understandable in the language of Western philosophy, and his attempts to contrast the paradoxicality of Buddhist logic with the logical strategies of Aristotle, Kant, or Hegel. Featured in this book is an interpretation of Nishida's writings. Professor Carter focuses on the Japanese thinker's notion of "basho," a concept of nothingness as field, place or topos as borrowed from Plato's Tim'us. Expounding on the logical foundations and archaic elements in Nishida's work, and carefully explaining Nishida's critical approach to the questions of God, religion and morality, and pure existence, this discerning book offers students of Western philosophy and oriental thought alike a highly readable introduction to the teachings of a true world philosopher.

Introduces the work and thought of Nishida Kitar-o, a Japanese who was one of the 20th century's most profound interpreters of Oriental metaphysics in the language Western philosophy. Expounds his approach to God, religion, morality, and pure experience, with chapters on the logic of basho, self-contradictory identity, God and nothingness, action intuition, and values and feeling. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

In his new study, Beyond Atheism, Beyond God, author Philip A. Stahl uses atheism as a rational stepping stone to arrive at an emergent conception of the universe, exposing features that might be described as transcendent. He presents an impersonal approach to Being that is devoid of any specific religious overtones or affi liations. Each person becomes a quantum-based co-creator in his or her own right, according to physicist Henry Stapp. As such, we are able to thereby see ourselves and our humanity in a new light, as opposed to being merely reactive cogs in a vast mechanical-reductionist machine. Effectively, we emerge as much more than assemblies of molecules. This volume, the fourth and final entry in Stahls series on atheism, seeks to arrive at a transcendent concept of being that also surpasses absolutism and nave or dogmatic deity templates. It considers the development of a more realistic, cogent and effective ethics and morality less likely to be exploited by the power mongers or sacred source apologists, and it answers the question of whether God existsthough not in the way one would normally assume.

In this long-awaited work, Ray L. Hart offers a speculative theology that profoundly challenges traditional understandings of God. Drawing on a lifetime of reading in philosophy and religious thought, Hart unfolds a vision of God perpetually in process: an unfinished God. Breaking out of the classical doctrine of divine persons, Hart reimagines Trinity as composed of theogony, cosmogony, and anthropogony an emerging Godhead in relation to origins, temporal creation, and human existence. The book s ultimate import is that all of Being and Nonbeing emerges together in interrelation and interdependence. This divine reality, Hart explains, is unfinished, imperfect, still in the course of a living-dying process that implicates all things, existent and inexistent, temporal and eternal. Doctrinal closuresomething that every orthodox theology requiresthus becomes impossible, and rightly so. Hart confronts those orthodoxies by asking: How can thinking of God reach closure when the divine is itself unfinished and its appearance to us always amounts to new creation? Hart s insights open the potencies of the nothing to the actualization of freedomthe freedom to create. That is, the nothing is not for nothingit is procreative. In the domain of radical speculative theology, then, Hart offers a fully deconstructive revisioning of the Christian God as ever an emerging and self-transfiguring actuality. It is a work with which all serious students of theology will wish to contend."

Based around an interview with Tadao Ando, this book explores the influence of the Buddhist concept of nothingness on Ando’s Christian architecture, and sheds new light on the cultural significance of the buildings of one of the world’s leading contemporary architects. Specifically, this book situates Ando’s churches, particularly his world-renowned Church of the Light (1989), within the legacy of nothingness expounded by Kitaro Nishida (1870-1945), the father of the Kyoto Philosophical School. Linking Ando’s Christian architecture with a philosophy originating in Mahayana Buddhism illuminates the relationship between the two religious systems, as well as tying Ando’s architecture to the influence of Nishida on post-war Japanese art and culture.

The past twenty years have seen the publication of numerous translations and commentaries on the principal philosophers of the Kyoto School, but so far no general overview and evaluation of their thought has been available, either in Japanese or in Western languages. James Heisig, a longstanding participant in these efforts, has filled that gap with Philosophers of Nothingness. In this extensive study, the ideas of Nishida Kitaro, Tanabe Hajime, and Nishitani Keiji are presented both as a consistent school of thought in its own right and as a challenge to the Western philosophical tradition to open itself to the original contribution of Japan.

Meister Eckhart, a now-popular medieval German mystic, provides the contemporary person with a way of living that centers on nothing but God in everyday life. He insists that everyone—whatever they have done, whatever they believe—is one with God. Because of this, the good Meister sees no opposition between our spiritual and daily lives. We access oneness with God through letting go. Bliss and freedom flow from giving birth to this divine oneness right where we are. This book intends to help us live this everyday mysticism by prayer and letting go. Meister Eckhart invites all of us to realize our divine oneness in the midst of raising a family, commuting, doing our jobs, cooking, cleaning, and scheduling. Meister Eckhart preaches that God is one with every one of us in our everyday lives.

From the mystic's experience of nothingness and the desert, The Other Side of Nothingness offers a theology of humility sensitive to religious pluralism and to the pain of spiritual oppression. With a passionate concern for contemporary interreligious issues, Beverly J. Lanzetta provides insight into how mystical consciousness overturns claims of dogmatic truth and prepares the self to experience the radical openness of divinity. The work draws on a variety of Christian mystical texts, including those of Meister Ekhart, Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo-Dionysius, Saint Teresa of Avila, Saint Bonaventure, and the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing while also making reference to Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism and the thought of contemporary social mystics such as Heschel, Gandhi, Merton, Thurman, and Day. Lanzetta illustrates how the annihilatory mystical experience draws the seeker to a place beyond a tradition's self-understanding to new dimensions of the sacred and, in some cases, to new revelatory paradigms. It is here that she provokes our thought in her statement that the divine nature is itself pluralistic, non-absolute, and continually giving birth to new traditions. By showing how nothingness functions in mystical experience as a catalyst for the liberation of our hearts, we are brought to a vision of theology that is nonviolent and inclusive of all creation.

In life there are a few major questions. Among them are, "What do we gain?" "What's new?" and "What's the point?" This book creatively uses the Book of Ecclesiastes--where these questions often pop up--to investigate how we question, what we question, and why we question. Along the way you will encounter some of history's great questioners: Socrates, Soren Kierkegaard, Virginia Woolf, Friedrich Nietzsche, G. K. Chesterton, and others, though they may appear in unexpected ways. Something Beyond Nothing? is an experiment in finding and making meaning that focuses on the unpredictable journey of living with questions. Taking the awkwardness of Ecclesiastes as a cue, Brian Niece's odd book is a mix of storytelling, theological analysis, poetic meditation, philosophical investigation, drama, and biblical interpretation. Herein is nonfiction and fiction--with no clear line between the two--suggesting that our modes of meaning may be as significant as the meaning they lead us to. What's more, if there is something beyond nothing, it may not be quite like what we think we know. And the God we don't yet know may surprise us.

Hailed as “one of the most significant books ever published,” this work of far-reaching vision is a comprehensive exploration of the evolution of human consciousness In this tour de force of scholarship and vision, Ken Wilber traces the course of evolution from matter to life to mind and describes the common patterns that evolution takes in all three of these domains. From the emergence of mind, he traces the evolution of human consciousness through its major stages of growth and development. Wilber particularly focuses on modernity and postmodernity: what they mean; how they impact gender issues, psychotherapy, ecological concerns, and various liberation movements; and how the modern and postmodern world conceive of Spirit. This second edition features forty pages of new material, new diagrams, and extensively revised notes.