David Burrell

In a further bit of irony, disaffection with higher education has shifted that peculiar mode of understanding that we call religious into a rather privileged position. To be sure, many of those people who call themselves religious would not engage in this sort of understanding, but that need not detain us here. The central point of these reflections will be an attempt to display a mode of understanding which one might properly call religious. I shall undertake this from a frankly philosophical perspective, but one which remains conscious that philosophic reason also stands in need of illumination. My own conviction holds that attempts of men to delineate the mode of understanding called religious have often been most useful in recalling us to that style of living called philosophic. I think this will prove to be more and more true today, as we try to understand what it means to do philosophy after its demise has been announced and celebrated.

Albert Speer's life offers a paradigm of self-deception, and his autobiography serves to illustrate Fingarette's account of self-deception as a persistent failure to spell out our engagements in the world. Using both Speer and Fingarette, we show how self-deception becomes our lot as the stories we adopt to shape our lives cover up what is destructive in our activity. Had Speer not settled for the neutral label of "architect," he might have found a story substantive enough to allow him to recognize the implications of his engagements with Hitler's Reich. This side of Auschwitz we require a story which allows us to appropriate our own capacities for evil and yet empowers us to go on.

In this book, David Burrell, one of the foremost philosophical theologians in the English-speaking world, presents the best of his work on creation and human freedom. A collection of writings by one of the foremost philosophers of religion in the English-speaking world. Brings together in one volume the best of David Burrell’s work on creation and human freedom from the last twenty years. Dismantles the ‘libertarian’ approach to freedom underlying Western political and economic systems. Engages with Islam, Judaism and Christianity, and with modern and pre-modern systems of thought. The author is noted for his rigorous approach, his wry humor, his intellectual subtlety and his generous spirit

The author of The Reality of Time and the Existence of God turns his critical conceptual acumen to finding an intellectually viable path between the current polarities of dualism and materialism. By considering human beings as language-using animals he can critically appraise “representational” views of concept formation, as well as show how current “research programs” which presuppose a “materialist” basis stem from an unwitting adoption of a dualist picture of mind and body. His alternative is rooted in classical thinkerslike Aquinas and responsive to the critiques of Wittgenstein, yet constructive in ways in which those critiques failed to be. This essay aims to help readers undertake a taxing inquiry by guiding them through its main theses.

This work offers a bold and illuminating exercise in philosophy as narrative, and in doing so presents itself quite consciously as an alternative mode of explanation to the "rationalist paradigm" which dominated Greek philosophy. Yet while acknowledging the inspiration of Hegel, the work hews far more closely than the author of Phänomenologie des Geistes to the actual dialectic of explanation as it worked itself out from Aristotle through Plotinus to Aquinas--to mention only the most prominent milestones. In that respect, the book offers an apparently independent and certainly more lyrical orchestration of the themes elaborated in such careful counterpoint by Edward Booth in his Aristotelian Aporetic Ontology in Islamic and Christian Writers. Indeed, for each author, it is a stubborn aporia inherent in Aristotle's project, yet resistant to resolution in terms of that same project, which fuels the resultant "historical dialectic." Booth's formulation focuses on the metaphysical clash between Aristotle's assertion that existing individuals bear ontological primacy and his insistence that form alone is intelligible, however, while Madigan pinpoints the explanatory lacuna in the project of Aristotle's Metaphysics as he intended it to complete the Physics. Yet I would suggest that these two formulations manifest a single metaphysical impasse for Aristotle; in fact, the very one which was to come to the fore in the debate which emerged within Islamic, Jewish, and Christian philosophical theology regarding the origins of the universe. As Madigan summarizes it: "a theory of creation or the production of the world through efficient causality is necessary to explain the world, or to render Aristotle's system complete. This is what Plotinus' philosophy lacked. But given creation or the free production of an independent world, a theory of salvation is necessary to make creation itself for the first time rational".