Transformations of Mind
Philosophy as Spiritual Practice

This book deals with issues at the intersection of philosophy, theology, religious studies and Buddhist studies.

Michael McGhee (Author)

9780521771696, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 April 2000

302 pages
23.6 x 15.7 x 2.1 cm, 0.61 kg

'… what we have in this book is the story of a profoundly searching Western mind, steeped in European high culture and philosophy and invigorated by a very new conception of Buddhist praxis. This work, rich, dense, though at times elusive, has a pedigree among the eccentrics of Western thought that runs from Augustine through Montaigne and Kierkegaard to Nietzche. For all its quirks, it makes for a provocative and rewarding ruminative reading.' Journal of Applied Philosophy

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.

Introduction
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 …

Subject Areas: Philosophy of religion [HRAB]