A Mystical Philosophy: Transcendence and Immanence in the Works of Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781472522801)

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 famous atheists Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch, Donna Lazenby shows how these 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 book 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. Lazenby 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.


Author: Donna J. Lazenby
ISBN-10: 147252280X
ISBN-13: 9781472522801
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Language: English
Published: 03/27/2014
Pages: 344
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.20lbs
Size: 8.60h x 5.60w x 1.00d