A Mystical Philosophy contributes to the contemporary resurgence of interest in Spirituality, but from a new direction. Revealing, in an original and provocative study, the mystical contents of the works of the famous atheists Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch, the author shows how these women thinkers' refusal to construe worldviews on available reductive models brought them to offer radically alternative pictures of life which maintain its mysteriousness, and promote a mystical way of knowing. This study makes a daring ...
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A Mystical Philosophy contributes to the contemporary resurgence of interest in Spirituality, but from a new direction. Revealing, in an original and provocative study, the mystical contents of the works of the famous atheists Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch, the author shows how these women thinkers' refusal to construe worldviews on available reductive models brought them to offer radically alternative pictures of life which maintain its mysteriousness, and promote a mystical way of knowing. This study makes a daring claim: that a return to 'pure' experience is sufficient to demonstrate, for the contemporary imagination, the irreducibly mystical contents of everyday life, and, therefore, the enduring appropriateness of theological conversations. The author reveals how these atheist thinkers offer crucial spiritual-intellectual advice for our times: a warning against reductive scientific and philosophical models that impoverish our understanding of our selves and the world, and a powerful endorsement of ways of knowing that give art, and a restored concept of contemplation, their consummative place.
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