Lexington Books The Religious Existentialists and the Redemption of Feeling

Traditional philosophizing has generally depended upon reason as its primary access to truth. Subjective experiences such as feelings, the passions, and emotions have typically been viewed as secondary to reason, untrustworthy, or both. The Religious Existentialists and the Redemption of Feeling revisits how the movement of existentialism, via the religious existentialists, has contributed to a rethinking of the role of subjective experience, in contrast to the rationalist and idealist traditions, thus reframing the importance of feelings in general for the philosophical enterprise as a whole. Through the considerations of a variety of thinkers, this collection provides a fresh look at the contributions of twentieth-century existentialists, thereby re-contextualizing the very notion of existentialism, offering a powerful and genuine re-evaluation of the significance of subjectivity, and underscoring the continued relevance of the religious existentialists. Review It is high time the religious existentialists received the recognition they deserve for their profound insights into the existential nature of human experience. This book provides a much needed corrective to their neglect in the movement, which is often mistakenly defined by the pessimism of Sartre. As the contributors to this volume expertly reveal, we have much to learn from thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Marcel, Scheler, Unamuno, Buber, Levinas, Jaspers, Irigaray, and others, on such defining human concerns as shame, hope and love, religious affirmation, authentic existence, and the key existentialist theme of the relationship between emotion, thought, and experience.--Brendan Sweetman, Rockhurst University The Religious Existentialists and the Redemption of Feeling is itself a kind of redemption: a redemption of an important part of the existentialist movement that has been somewhat neglected in recent years. This very well written and in-depth collection of essays takes us back to medieval roots, through Kierkegaard, and on to an impressively wide and cosmopolitan variety of thinkers from the past century and a half-- Marcel, Unamuno, Berdiaev, Rosenzweig, Jaspers, Buber, and many more. There are seventeen chapters in all, making for an extremely fruitful read.--William L. McBride, Purdue University About the Author James Abordo Ong is a Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of San Diego. He holds an MLitt. in Philosophy from the University of St. Andrews and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Duke University. He co-convened an interdisciplinary seminar on human cooperation at the Franklin Humanities Institute in 2015-16.