In this book, Robert Doran offers the first in-depth treatment of the major theories of the sublime, from the ancient Greek treatise On the Sublime and its reception in early modern literary theory to the philosophical accounts of Burke and Kant. Doran explains how and why the sublime became a key concept of modern thought and shows how the various theories of sublimity are united by a common structure - the paradoxical experience of being at once overwhelmed (...) and exalted - and a common concern: the preservation of a notion of transcendence in the face of the secularization of modern culture. Combining intellectual history with literary theory and philosophical analysis, his book provides a new, searching and multilayered account of a concept that continues to stimulate thought about our responses to art, nature and human events. (shrink)

Philosophy -- Ethics beyond existentialism and structuralism: Sartre's critique of dialectical reason and the debate with Levi-Strauss -- Foucault's ethics of the self -- Derrida in Heidelberg: the specter of Heidegger's Nazism and the question of ethics -- Richard Rorty's cultural politics: ironist philosophy and the ethics of reading -- History -- From metahistory to the practical past: Hayden White's existentialist philosophy of history -- Hayden White and the ethics of historiography literature -- The ethics of conversion: metaphysical desire in (...) Ren, Girard, and Jean-Paul Sartre -- The ethics of realism: literary history and the sublime in Erich Auerbach's mimesis -- The ethics of philology: Erich Auerbach and the fate of humanism -- Edward Said, orientalism, and the political turn in literary and cultural studies. (shrink)

For the edition of A Second Collection prepared for the Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, editors Robert M. Doran and John D. Dadosky have added archival materials directly related to almost every one of the papers, bringing the reader closer to the original compositions.

Some have taken Bernard Lonergan's statements about the differences between the presentation of decision in Insight and the chapter on the human good in Method in Theologyto mean that chapter 18 of Insight is to be discarded in favor of chapter 2 of Method. The paper argues that there is a validity to both presentations, a validity that corresponds to the third and second modes of making an election in the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius. A concluding suggestions relates the (...) second mode of election and Method's presentation of decision to René Girard's mimetic theory. (shrink)

Many of the elements of the problem of implementation have been assembled in Philip McShane’s paper and addressed in his life’s work to date. The dimension to which I wish to contribute is the need to lift the chapter on Systematics in Method in Theology out of its tired and minimalist context into the context that Lonergan seems to have had in mind when, at the time of the breakthrough to functional specialization, what eventually was called Systematics was named ‘Explanation’ (...) and its mediated object was said to be Geschichte. At that point Lonergan had in mind, I submit, not simply summing up and integrating the dogmatico-theological context – and even that task does not emerge clearly in Method’s chapter – but also advancing that context, in fact catapulting it into the third stage of meaning and onto the plateau where a normative source of meaning has been articulated that, while remaining normative, pays full recognition to historical mindedness. (shrink)

This review-essay examines Martin Jay’s The Eclipse of Reason: On Late Critical Theory with a view toward understanding the stakes of its interpretative approach to intellectual history. I show how Jay's book aims to provide much more than a mere history of reason, for it seeks to legitimate and resuscitate an idea of reason in the face of more than one hundred years of anti-rationalist thought. I contend that Jay offers Habermas’s intersubjective rationality as both an alternative to, but also (...) in some sense a continuation of, the dominant forms of subjectivist and objectivist rationality Jay documents in his book. According to the logic of Jay’s account, then, Habermas represents in some sense the fulfillment of the history of Western rationality. My only critique of an otherwise excellent and fascinating study is that Jay’s Frankfurt School-centric narrative effectively inhibits a larger discussion of Habermas’s relevance to recent and current debates about the direction of philosophy. An elaboration specifically of the post-structuralist critique of reason would have greatly enhanced our understanding of the place of "late Critical Theory" in the intellectual landscape of our time. (shrink)