The resounding soul : reflections on the metaphysics and vivacity of the human person

It is surely not coincidental that the term “soul” should mean not only the centre of a creature’s life and consciousness, but also a thing or action characterised by intense vivacity (“that bike’s got soul!”). It also seems far from coincidental that the same contemporary academic discussions that have largely cast aside the language of “soul” in their quest to define the character of human mental life should themselves be so bloodless, or so lacking in soul. The Resounding Soul arises from the opposite premise: that the task of understanding human nature is bound up with the more critical task of learning to be fully human. The papers collected here are derived from a conference in Oxford sponsored by the Centre of Theology and Philosophy and explore the often surprising landscape that emerges when human consciousness is approached from this angle. Drawing upon literary, philosophical, theological, historical, and musical modes of analysis, these essays remind the reader of the power of the ancient language of soul over against contemporary impulses to reduce, fragment, and overly determine human selfhood.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
List of Contributors
Introduction – Samuel Kimbriel and Eric Austin Lee
Section I: The Soul and the Saeculum
1 The Experience of Death: The Immortality of the Soul and the Unity of the Person in Landsberg, Scheler, and Augustine – Anna Piazza
2 Bernard Stiegler’s Politics of the Soul and His New Otium of the People – Johann Rossouw
3 Eucharistic Anthropology: Alexander Schmemann’s Conception of Beings in Time – Andrew T. J. Kaethler
4 The Psychology of Cosmopolitics – John Milbank
Section II: Fracture and Unity
5 “Know Thyself”: The Soul of Anatomical Dissection – Kimbell Kornu
6 Persons and Narratives: A Physicalist Account of the Soul – K. Nicholas Forti
7 Transcending the Body/Soul Distinction through the Perspective of Maximus the Confessor’s Anthropology – Sotiris Mitralexis
8 Nous (Energeia) and Kardia (Dynamis) in the Holistic Anthropology of St. Gregory Palamas – Nichifor Tănase
9 Souls, Minds, Bodies, and Planets – Mary Midgley
Section III: Moving to Wholeness
10 The Soul in the Novel: From Daniel Defoe to David Foster Wallace – Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist.
11 Difficult Conversion: Shakespeare and the Soul of Religion – Anthony D. Baker
12 Both, Between, and Beyond: The Third Term and the Relation Constituting Being – L. C. Wilson
Section IV: The Soul’s Regard
13 Strategies of the Gift: Body and Soul in John Paul II and Levinas – Nigel Zimmermann
14 Redeeming Duality: Anthropological Split-ness and Embodied Soteriology – Lexi Eikelboom
15 Music and Liminal Ethics: Facilitating a “Soulful Reality” – Férdia J. Stone-Davis
Section V: Vivacity
16 The Soul and “All Things”: Contribution to a Postmodern Account of the Soul – W. Chris Hackett
17 The Soul at Work: A Reading in Catholic Romanticism – Simone Kotva
18 Soul Music and Soul-less Selving – William Desmond
Name and Subject Index