George Pattison
Biographic Data
| ID | 3836024 |
|---|---|
| NAME | George Pattison |
| GIVEN NAMES | George |
| FAMILY NAME | Pattison |
| SIGNATURE | PATTISON G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Glasgow |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8036-9761 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 65 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 6 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 59 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 6 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Short notices
Heidegger and Dostoevsky on European Nihilism
In the light of Heidegger’s use of Dostoevsky at the start of his lectures on European nihilism, the article considers and evaluates Heidegger’s and Dostoevsky’s respective accounts of the nature of European or Western nihilism and how this may be overcome
A Philosophy of Prayer: Nothingness, Language, and Hope
The book offers an exploration of prayer within the perspective of post-Kantian philosophy. Against a background of traditional sources, including Augustine, The Cloud of Unknowing, and the seventeenth-century French School of spirituality, the book uses Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Heidegger, Berdyaev, Tillich, Marcel, Simone Weil, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean-Louis Chrétien to provide an interpretation of what is meant by the passivit…
Conversations about Kierkegaard: Memories of Ann Loades as teacher
In this brief reflection, George Pattison reflects upon the experience of Ann Loades as a teacher and supervisor at the University of Durham and, more generally, the nature of theological academic life in England in the late twentieth century and the virtues that Ann exhibited within that world
On Being and Becoming: An Existentialist Approach to Life by Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei
Reviewed by: On Being and Becoming: An Existentialist Approach to Life by Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei George Pattison (bio) Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei. On Being and Becoming: An Existentialist Approach to Life. Oxford UP, 2021. 320 pages. As Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei observes, the last few years have seen a significant resurgence of interest in existentialism, both in and beyond the academy. Authors and texts who were dismissed during…
Tracey Rowland, Beyond Kant and Nietzsche: The Munich Defence of Christian Humanism
God Speaks Within: From Mystical Vision to Devout Listening
In the Bible, the human God-relationship is typically established through and by the phenomenon of “calling”. However, for much subsequent theology, this has been displaced by “vision”, “taste” or “feeling”. Referring to the notion of an inner word, the paper follows Kierkegaard's treatment of silence as, alternatively, a mode of inattention and attention to such an inner word. With Heidegger, the paper turns to the notion of vocation, both as in…
A Metaphysics of Love: A Philosophy of Christian Life Part III
The book is the third and final part of a philosophy of Christian life. The first part applied a phenomenological approach to the literature of the devout life tradition, focussing on the feeling of being drawn to devotion to God; the second part examined what happens when this feeling is interpreted as a call or vocation. At its heart, this is the call to love that is made explicit in the Christian love-commandment but is shown to be implied eve…
The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought
The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought is an authoritative new reference and interpretive volume detailing the origins, development, and influence of one of the richest aspects of Russian cultural and intellectual life – its religious ideas. After setting the historical background and context, the Handbook follows the leading figures and movements in modern Russian religious thought through a period of immense historical upheavals, incl…
C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard and Spirituality: Accountability as the Meaning of Human Existence
Law, Love and Freedom: From the Sacred to the Secular. By Joshua Neoh
Joshua Neoh’s book starts by asking “How does one lead a life of law, love and freedom?” (p. 1), implying that each is desirable and that all three are combinable. However, as Neoh also makes clear, this is not self-evident. Some favor love or freedom over law and vice versa, as illustrated in the apostle Paul’s polemic against the Jewish Law. To complicate matters further, each of the key terms turns out to be internally polarized. Some understa…
Copyright Page
A Crisis of Vocation
The modern experience of the disenchantment of the world seems to count against the possibility of vocation/calling being anything more than an empty metaphor. The crisis of vocation in modernity is explored with reference to the Lutheran conception of vocation and its eclipse, Max Weber’s account of Protestantism and the application of the idea of vocation to a life in science, Heidegger’s attempt to reanimate philosophy through the idea of voca…
At the Name of Jesus
In this chapter the focus turns from God’s call to human beings to human beings calling upon God in prayer. This is especially exemplified in the practice of hesychasm or calling on the name of Jesus. This practice stimulated a series of philosophical and theological approaches to language among early twentieth century Russian thinkers: Pavel Florensky, Sergius Bulgakov, A. S. Losev, and Gustav Shpet. Despite significant differences these converg…
In the Beginning was the Word
Turning to the New Testament, the chapter examines the prologue to St John’s Gospel as an exemplary commentary on Christian vocation. However, this requires rejecting interpretations that have seen John’s logos in terms of Platonic ideas or ‘ratio’, as in much ancient and medieval commentary (Eckhart’s commentary is used for illustration). German Idealism (Fichte) refigures ratio in terms of will, and in the twentieth century, Michel Henry foregr…
Epigraph
‘The heart could never speak But that the Word was spoken’ He said, ‘Let your tongue be moistened with the invocation of God morning and evening, and then no fault will fall upon you’. ‘A new science must be introduced: the Christian art of speaking, to be constructed admodum Aristotle’s Rhetoric.’
Conclusion
The conclusion sums up the argument of the book, explaining the interconnectedness of such key terms as vocation/calling, the name, and the promise and their essential coherence around the imperative of love. This prepares the transition to the third part of the philosophy of Christian life, A Metaphysics of Love.
A Rhetorics of the Word: A Philosophy of Christian Life, Part II
A Rhetorics of the Word is the second volume of a three-part philosophy of Christian life. It approaches Christian life as expressive of a divine calling or vocation. The word Church (ekklesia) and the role of naming in baptism indicate the fundamental place of calling in Christian life. However, ideas of vocation are difficult to access in a world shaped by the experience of disenchantment. The difficulties of articulating vocation are explored …
Poetic Vocation
Like ethics, literature too is often envisaged as involving some kind of call or vocation. In lectures on Hölderlin, Heidegger provides a more positive account of calling than in Being and Time. Yet he remains unspecific as to what we are called to, and his account is therefore expanded with regard to its socio-political and theological dimensions, developed in the direct of a certain Messianism (Derrida, Caputo). This is further explored in term…
Political Calling in an Age of Technology
The modern world has been marked by a recurring sense of the degradation of language. According to Hannah Arendt, for whom the possibility of politics is interdependent with the possibility of authentic speech, this generates a political crisis, connected to the role of science in contemporary society. The impact of science on the language of public discourse is further explored through Habermas and Uwe Poerksen. Their analyses receive added forc…
Prophetic Calling: At the Burning Bush
The chapter looks to the Hebrew Bible for resources to respond to the modern crisis of vocation. Prophecy appears as a special focus of discussion, since the prophet is who he is by virtue of being called. This is not a matter of psychological experiences of auditions but of understanding the essence of the prophet’s God-relationship. A paradigm case of prophecy is the calling of Moses at the burning bush. Salient features of this event include G…
The Call of Conscience
Although it is common to speak of the call of conscience, the specifically linguistic character of this call is frequently occluded in the history of thought. This is clear in the modern history of the idea, in which ideas of moral intuition or moral sentiment predominate, from Cambridge Platonism through to neo-Kantianism. This occlusion is flagged by Gerhard Ebeling, who emphasizes the word-event character of conscience. This is further develop…
Rhetorics of the Word: A Philosophy of Christian Life, Part II
The Tempted Self
As a complex relational entity, the self is exposed to constant centripetal pressures that it experiences as temptations. However, temptation is not primarily seen as the lure of sensual pleasures threatening the rule of reason. The primary source of temptation is other people, wanting to be like them, and to win their favour. Resisting temptation is made all the more difficult by the way in which choices are mediated through language, which faci…
Starting with the Self
Seeing the devout life as a practice of the self connects the enquiry to recent philosophical discussions of selfhood. A prominent theme in such discussions is autonomy. Theology and religion have typically reacted negatively to strong versions of autonomy that suggest the self is capable of complete self-determination, although more moderate versions of autonomy as self-governance are actively endorsed by Christian thinkers, from de Sales, throu…
Kierkegaard: Aesthetics and ‘The Aesthetic’
Journal Article KIERKEGAARD: AESTHETICS AND ‘THE AESTHETIC’ Get access George Pattison George Pattison Badwell Ash Rectory, Bury St EdmundsSuffolk IP3 3DH, England Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Aesthetics, Volume 31, Issue 2, April 1991, Pages 140–151, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjaesthetics/31.2.140 Published: 01 April 1991
A Metaphysics of Love: A Philosophy of Christian Life Part III
The book is the third and final part of a philosophy of Christian life. The first part applied a phenomenological approach to the literature of the devout life tradition, focussing on the feeling of being drawn to devotion to God; the second part examined what happens when this feeling is interpreted as a call or vocation. At its heart, this is the call to love that is made explicit in the Christian love-commandment but is shown to be implied eve…
Søren Kierkegaard: A Theatre Critic of the Heiberg School
Journal Article SØREN KIERKEGAARD: A THEATRE CRITIC OF THE HEIBERG SCHOOL Get access George Pattison George Pattison Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Aesthetics, Volume 23, Issue 1, WINTER 1983, Pages 25–33, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjaesthetics/23.1.25 Published: 01 January 1983
Nihilism and the Novel: Kierkegaard's Literary Reviews
Journal Article NIHILISM AND THE NOVEL: KIERKEGAARD'S LITERARY REVIEWS Get access George Pattison George Pattison Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Aesthetics, Volume 26, Issue 2, SPRING 1986, Pages 161–171, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjaesthetics/26.2.161 Published: 01 February 1986
Eternal Loneliness: Art and Religion in Kierkegaard and Zen
When we compare a thinker as complex and many–sided as Søren Kierkegaard with a cultural phenomenon as significant as Zen Buddhism it is unlikely that we will be able to come up with any simple formula by which to summarize the results of the comparison. But the value of such comparative studies need not in any case lie in the conclusions we reach but in the intrinsic interest and importance of the material itself, in the questions and insights r…
A drama of love and death: Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard and Regine Olsen revisited
(1990). A drama of love and death: Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard and Regine Olsen revisited. History of European Ideas: Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 79-91
Kierkegaard: Aesthetics and ‘The Aesthetic’
Journal Article KIERKEGAARD: AESTHETICS AND ‘THE AESTHETIC’ Get access George Pattison George Pattison Badwell Ash Rectory, Bury St EdmundsSuffolk IP3 3DH, England Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Aesthetics, Volume 31, Issue 2, April 1991, Pages 140–151, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjaesthetics/31.2.140 Published: 01 April 1991
Kierkegaard on Art and Communication
Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious: From the Magic Theatre to the Crucifixion of the Image
Art and Theology
George Frederick Watts and Hope
Agnosis: Theology in the Void: Theology in the Void
"Poor Paris!": Kierkegaard's Critique of the Spectacular City
Kierkegaard The Self in Society: The Self in Society
Anxious Angels: A Retrospective View of Religious Existentialism
Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to the Later Heidegger (Routledge Philosophyguidebooks)
Dostoevsky and the Christian Tradition
Dostoevsky is one of Russia's greatest novelists and a major influence in modern debates about religion, both in Russia and the West. This collection brings together Western and Russian perspectives on the issues raised by the religious element in his work. The aim of this collection is not to abstract Dostoevsky's religious 'teaching' from his literary works, but to explore the interaction between his Christian faith and his writing. The essays …
Kierkegaard, Religion and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Culture
Kierkegaard is often viewed in the history of ideas solely within the academic traditions of philosophy and theology. The secondary literature generally ignores the fact that he also took an active role in the public debate about the significance of the modern age that was taking shape in the flourishing feuilleton literature during the period of his authorship. Through a series of sharply focussed studies, George Pattison contextualises Kierkega…
Dostoevsky and the Christian Tradition
Kierkegaard's Upbuilding Discourses: Philosophy, Literature, and Theology
Thinking about God in an Age of Technology
This book argues that the contemporary crisis of radical theology, from John Robinson to deconstruction, is connected with theology’s failure to take the technological nature of modern society seriously. An overview of modern theologians who did take technology into account, such as Teilhard de Chardin and Jacques Ellul is presented, although their judgments were mostly negative. This is followed by an exposition of Heidegger’s critique of techno…
Philosophy of Kierkegaard
Kierkegaard and Genre
Noting the apparent chaos of Søren Kierkegaard's writing, the essay shows that Kierkegaard did, nevertheless, have a highly self-conscious relation to issues of genre, which was a central concern in the aesthetic theory of his critical role model, J. L. Heiberg. Salient features of Heiberg's aesthetics are discussed and their echoes in Kierkegaard's writing illustrated. Kierkegaard is also aware that Heiberg's schema of genres breaks down in the …
God and Being: An Enquiry
Speaking of God in terms of being has become one of the most hotly contested topics in the philosophy of religion. Pattison offers a response that takes into account the insights of postmodern thinking whilst attempting to provide a new basis for religious language and life.
Kierkegaard and the Theology of the Nineteenth Century: The Paradox and the ‘Point of Contact’
This study shows how Kierkegaard's mature theological writings reflect his engagement with the wide range of theological positions which he encountered as a student, including German and Danish Romanticism, Hegelianism and the writings of Fichte and Schleiermacher. George Pattison draws on both major and lesser-known works to show the complexity and nuances of Kierkegaard's theological position, which remained closer to Schleiermacher's affirmati…
Kierkegaard and the Quest for Unambiguous Life: Between Romanticism and Modernism: Selected Essays
This book looks at Kierkegaard with a fresh perspective shaped by the history of ideas, framed by the terms romanticism and modernism. 'Modernism' here refers to the kind of intellectual and literary modernism associated with Georg Brandes, and such later nineteenth and early twentieth century figures as J. P. Jacobsen, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Ibsen (all often associated with Kierkegaard in early secondary literature), and the young Georg Lukacs. …
The Oxford Handbook of Theology and Modern European Thought
Modern European thought' describes a wide range of philosophies, cultural programmes, and political arguments developed in Europe in the period following the French Revolution. Throughout this period, many of the wide range of 'modernisms' (and anti-modernisms) had a distinctly religious and even theological character-not least when religion was subjected to the harshest criticism. Yet for all the breadth and complexity of modern European thought…
Philosophy (37 works) · Epistemology (19 works) · Art (14 works) · Theology (14 works) · History (12 works) · Kierkegaardian Philosophy and Influence (12 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Political science (9 works) · Art history (8 works)