Transformations of mind : philosophy as spiritual practice / Michael McGhee.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

McGhee, Michael, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Philosophy.

Buddhism and philosophy.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (viii, 293 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Summary:

The book offers a conception of philosophy as a form of self-enquiry which begins not in reflection, but in silence and meditation, conceived as conditions for the emergence and cessation of contending states of mind which influence perception and action. The philosopher thus becomes a kind of cartographer of a shifting interior landscape. This underlying perspective explains the personal nature of the writing and its mixing of genres. The book draws on both the Greek and Buddhist traditions, recognising that it is time for Western thinkers to acknowledge and respond to an intercultural canon. It aims to integrate ethics and a non-theistic philosophy of religion through the medium of aesthetics, mapping Buddhist 'mindfulness' and the Greek virtues and vices of temperance and licentiousness, continence and incontinence, onto an account of the development of moral sentiments and their relation to practical judgement in the context of oppressive political and social realities.

Contents:

1. 'A philosophy that is not a philosophy'

2. Contrary states

3. ' ... you hear the grating roar'

4. The energy for war

5. The division of the soul

6. 'Wandering between two worlds ... '

7. Kant's aesthetic ideas

8. ... And his rational ones

9. Arnold's recast religion

10. Theism, non-theism and Haldane's Fork

11. Erotic reformations

12. A language of grasping and non-grasping

13. ' ... sinne/ like clouds ecclips'd my mind'

14. Concentration, continence and arousal

15. Uneasily, he retraces his steps ...

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

Includes bibliographical references (p. 287-289) and index.

ISBN:

1-107-11939-1

0-511-01168-7

1-280-42948-8

0-511-17273-7

0-511-15158-6

0-511-31074-9

0-511-61243-5

0-511-04959-5

OCLC:

437250300