Joseph Stephen O'Leary

The New Constellation By Richard J. Bernstein Polity Press, 1991. Pp. 358. ISBN 0–7456–0920–1. £39.50 hbk, £12.95 pbk. Essays in Quasi‐Realism By Simon Blackburn Oxford University Press, 1993. Pp. viii + 262. ISBN 0–19–508244–9. £16.95 The Contents of Experience Edited by Tim Crane Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. xii + 275. ISBN 0–521–41727–9. £30.00. Life‐World, Modernity and Critique: Paths between Heidegger and the Frankfurt School By Fred Dallmayr Polity Press, 1991. Pp. x + 244. ISBN 0–7456–0819–1. £35.00. Risky Business By Elaine Draper Cambridge University Press, 1991. 315 pp. ISBN 0–521–37027–2. £30.00 hbk. Nietzsche et la rhétorique By Angéle Kremer‐Marietti Presses Universitaries de France, 1992. Pp. 269. ISBN 2–13–044918–2. FF 210. The Lives of Michel Foucault By David Macey Hutchinson, 1993. Pp. 599. ISBN 0–09–1753449. £20.00. Essays on Aristotle's De Anima Edited by Martha C. Nussbaum and Amélie Oksenberg Rorty Clarendon Press, 1992. Pp. viii + 439. ISBN 0–19–824461–4. £45.00. Pseudo‐Dionysius and the Metaphysics of Aquinas By Fran O'Rourke E. J. Brill, 1992. Pp. xvi + 300. ISBN 0–90–04–09466–0. $85.75. Universalism vs. Communitarianism: Contemporary Debates in Ethics Edited by David Rasmussen MIT Press, 1990. Pp. 308. ISBN 0–26268063–7. $18.75 pbk. Objections to Physicalism Edited by Howard Robinson Clarendon Press, 1993. Pp. vi+326. ISBN 0–19–824256–5. £32.50. The Question of Being. A Reversal of Heidegger By Stanley Rosen Yale University Press, 1993. Pp. xxiii + 344. ISBN 0–300–05356–8. $37.50. Inequality Reexamined By Amartya Sen Oxford University Press, 1992. Pp. xiv + 207. ISBN 0–19–828395–4. £20.00. Heidegger and the Project of Fundamental Ontology By Jacques Taminiaux Translated and edited by Michael Gendre State University of New York Press, 1991. Pp. 233. ISBN 0–791–40685–7. $59.50. The Epistemology of Religious Experience By Keith E. Yandell Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. viii + 371. ISBN 0–521–37426‐X. £35.00.

The Christian God By Richard Swinburne, Clarendon Press, 1994. Pp. 261. ISBN 0–19–823512–7. £13.95 (pbk). Reason and the Christian Religion: Essays in Honour of Richard Swinburne Edited by Alan G. Padgett, Clarendon Press, 1994. Pp. 362. ISBN 0–19–824042–2. $55.00 (hbk). Philosophers Who Believe Edited by Kelly James Clark, InterVarsity Press, 1993. Pp. 284. ISBN 0–8308–1851–0. $24.99 (hbk). Schopenhauer. On the Character of the World: The Metaphysics of Will By John E. Atwell, University of California Press, 1995. Pp. xii+ 224. ISBN B3148.A892. $35.00. Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy Edited by Constantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski, Routledge, 1994. Pp. 352. ISBN 0–415–90504–4. £40.00. Ethics with Aristotle By Sarah Broadie, Oxford University Press, 1991. Pp. xiii and 462. ISBN 0–19–508560–4. £17.95 (pbk). A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises By Stanley Cavell, Harvard University Press, 1994. Pp. xv + 196. ISBN 0–674–66980–0. $26.00. Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida By Stanley Cavell, Blackwell, 1995. Pp. x + 200. ISBN 0–631–19271–9. £10.99 (pbk). Critical Theory By D. Couzens Hoy and T. McCarthy, Blackwell, 1994. Pp. 280. ISBN 1–55786–173–0. £40.00. Aporias By Jacques Derrida. Translated by Thomas Dutoit, Stanford University Press, 1993. Pp. xv + 87. ISBN 0–8047–2233–1. $25. The Genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time, By Theodore Kisiel, University of California Press, 1993. Pp. xiii + 608. ISBN 0–520–20159–0. £18.00. Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View? By Norman Malcolm, edited with a response by Peter Winch, Cornell University Press, 1993. Pp. 192 incl. index. ISBN 0–8014–2978–1. £35.00. Pluralism, Justice and Equality Edited by David Miller and Michael Walzer, Oxford University Press, 1995. Pp. 297. ISBN 0–19–827937‐X. The Metaphysics of Identity over Time By David S. Oderberg, Macmillan, 1993. Pp. 228. ISBN 0–312–10208–91. £45.00. Morality and Action By Warren Quinn, Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. xii + 255. ISBN 0–521–44164–1. $49.95 (hbk). Mental Reality By Galen Strawson, MIT Press, 1994, Pp. 337. ISBN 0–262–19352–3. £24.95.

Focusing on the legend of Phaedra and Hippolytus as developed in Euripides and Seneca and especially in Racine’s Phèdre and taking into account as well its further development in works by Camillo Boito, Luchino Visconti, and Yukio Mishima, I make the following arguments: (1) Contrary to many theologians and philosophers of love, a pathological form of love that issues in murder and suicide should not be regarded as unworthy of serious attention. Racine’s tragedy provides a catharsis for universal experiences of unrequited love and jealousy, a major human phenomenon. (2) Contrary to Paul Valéry, Phèdre’s love cannot be called merely animal, since the analytical insight she develops into her morbid passion carries tremendous moral force and lies at the origin of the European psychological novel, as launched by Madame de La Fayette a year later. (3) Contrary to François Mauriac, even if she is a heroine of desire or concupiscence rather than of “true love” (in contrast to the relatively innocent affections of Hippolyte and Aricie), the incredible beauty of her language resists such an easy categorization. (4) Study of concrete presentations of “love” in literature confirms that the meaning and use of this word is marked by an irreducible pluralism. Philosophical and theological analysis of love has to come to terms with this. (5) The role of a work of art, in crystallizing archetypical emotions and situations in a way that carries authority, is to provide the middle ground between the abstractions of philosophy on the one hand and the uncontrollable diversity of the empirical on the other. Even psychologies or sociologies of love, which claim to be close to the concrete data, need to be anchored in and corrected by the special concrete vision that only great literature can bring.

Buddhism relentlessly exposes the impermanent, painful, and insubstantial character of all phenomena, but it ends up reinstating the conventional samsaric world as the place where nirvanic emptiness can be encountered and where compassion can be skilfully exercised. In Hegel and Heidegger one also finds dialectical reversals that bring a positive result from the ordeal of the negative. In Heidegger, the encounter with nothingness in anxiety brings a discovery of the phenomenon of being. In Hegel, the dialectical self-dissolution of received metaphysical notions generates a positive method of grasping the real. Heidegger's meditative thinking has an affinity with Hegel's Concept, in that both free the mind from the painfully constricted forms of metaphysics. Heidegger is also near to Daoism when he grounds the clarity of logical thought in a more obscure, originary kind of thought, and when he characterises the movement of thinking, at this more originary level, as a ‘way.’ All four dialectical paths reveal their vitality, in reciprocal critique, when rooted in the human quest to bring the everyday into connection with ultimate meaning.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Denying Divinity: Apophasis in the Patristic Christian and Soto Zen Buddhist TraditionsJoseph S. O'LearyDenying Divinity: Apophasis in the Patristic Christian and Soto Zen Buddhist Traditions. By J. P. Williams. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. 249. $65.00.Janet Williams studied patristic theology at Oxford and Soto Zen in Tokyo, in the circle of Nishijima Zenji. In Denying Divinity: Apophasis in the Patristic Christian and Soto Zen Buddhist Traditions, her excellent account of negation and silence in Pseudo-Dionysius and Maximus the Confessor (pp. 64-126) and in Dogen (pp. 126-179) is preceded by surveys of apophasis in earlier Christianity and Buddhism and followed by an eloquent defense of the importance of the twofold apophatic tradition for contemporary theology (pp. 180-228).The initial surveys show a sure-footed scholarly competence that may owe something to the author's experience as an investment banker. Her writing often exhibits a concentrated justesse, as in the two paragraphs on Origen (pp. 26-27). The temptation to forced comparisons between the two traditions is avoided until the concluding chapter, apart from a few unconvincing touches such as this remark: "How similar all this sounds to the 'unsupported thought' and the 'absence of thought-coverings' in the Prajñaparamita literature!"—in reference to Gregory of Nyssa on Abraham's faith, which was "unmixed and pure of any concept" (p. 29). Similarly, to speak of Plotinus' "recoil from—or transcendence of—ontological views" (p. 18) is inappropriately Nāgārjunian; Plotinus held firm, dogmatic views and entertained a host of speculative ones. (Incidentally, it is probably wrong to identify the experience recounted in Enneads IV.8—the relatively frequent ascent of the soul to contemplate the intelligible realm—with the union with the One, evoked in Porphyry, Life of Plotinus 23, a much rarer event [p. 21].)Gregory of Nyssa is nudged in the direction of Buddhism when Williams talks of "the inchoate undermining of the realist ontology he inherited from Plato and Aristotle" (pp. 32-33) and suggests that "the hesitation between ontology and 'disontology,' if it were a little more developed, would become the kind of recoil from [End Page 370] ontological views which we see as characteristic of apophasis" (p. 36). As a very kataphatic theologian in dogmatic debate, Gregory has no aversion to views; his apophasis applies only to certain views of the divine, especially heretical ones that he sees as hubristic. In Mādhyamaka Buddhism, one transcends "views" about anything, but in the Greek Fathers it is only views concerning God that are problematized. The Buddhist transcending of views is oriented to a nondual experience of everyday reality, but in the Fathers it concerns only the divine simplicity, infinity, and transcendence and the mysteries of the eternal generation of the Son and the Incarnation. It is untrue that "there is no explicit apophasis in Gregory" (p. 35): there is plenty of it in Contra Eunomium II, albeit of a simple kind. Nonetheless, Gregory's ontology remains realistic even at the level of divine being. One might query the view expressed by Rowan Williams that, for Gregory, the divine essence becomes "an abstraction and, in a sense, a fantasy" (p. 34).Dionysius is presented as a mobile and open-ended thinker who has been underestimated. He "negates both affirmation and negation, but by offering no third alternative, in a sense affirms them too as the only usable theological resources" (p. 121). Maximus accords with this, although attaining "a finer balance of incarnational christo-centrism over Neoplatonism" (p. 124). The claim that Dionysius "is at pains to distance himself from the Neoplatonist tradition of making transcendence prior or superior to immanence" (p. 216) is overstated, and it misses the degree to which Proclus had already seen the cosmos as pervaded by divine eros (as pointed out long ago by Anders Nygren).The emphasis on a nonduality of transcendence and immanence brings Dionysius into a rapprochement with more of the this-worldly Zen vision. Similarly, the stress on a "shocking activity of emptiness" (p. 141) in Dogen hints at a parallel with the divine ekstasis in Dionysius. But the latter is merely a variant of the Neoplatonic...

In accord with the motto of the Passionists—“We preach Christ crucified”—Breton located the essence of Christianity in a faith and love marked by open-ended questioning and dialogue and by an exodic movement of the spirit. Neoplatonism enabled him to raise his love of free inquiry to a high spiritual plane, and to bring into lucid focus the figure of Christ, ridding it of false absolutizations. Seeing the encounter with Buddhism as the next step in this purification of Christian vision, he pored over Nagarjuna in his last days. The totality of Breton’s life and work enacts a lighter, humbler understanding of the Gospel, one fully responsive to modern and postmodern questions.

In this article, Joseph S. O’Leary recounts the origin and inspirations behind the 1979 Colloquium Heidegger et la Question de Dieu, and reflects on why it became such a key moment in the development of many of those who took part in it. In addition to the contingent factors of a particular time and place, and the deep personal and intellectual significance that Heidegger bore for many of them, O’Leary identifies the perennial philosophical questions which the participants were able to address in original and controversial ways. O’Leary also reflects on the way this Colloquium served as a subsequent influence on his own original work as well as the critical dialogue he engaged in with many of the other participants, culminating in his most recent work on interreligious dialogue which further amplifies the central problematics here concerning the nature of the quest for truth.