How can this life have meaning if at my death nothing of me remains? This is the essential question with which Miguel de Unamuno, the most accomplished Spanish man of letters of the twentieth century, struggled during his entire life. Unamuno's views have been the subject of vigorous debate: Was he a Catholic, a Protestant, or an unbeliever? Miguel de Unamuno's Quest for Faith seeks to appreciate and clarify Unamuno's faith commitments without diminishing or exaggerating them. His historical context pulled him to equate knowledge with science, but his existential angst told him humans must be something more than short-lived products of matter. He believed that his philosophy and the resulting faith that he held must have consequences for the choices he made to live out his life meaningfully. Jan E. Evans surveys what was at stake in Unamuno's desire to believe and the stance that he came to live with. That stance is contrasted with thinkers whom he read and admired: Soren Kierkegaard, Blaise Pascal, and William James. Ultimately, this book tests Unamuno's philosophy against his own criterion that demanded concrete actions that were motivated by principled passion. It draws new readers of Unamuno into his world and provides critical new perspectives for those who know Unamuno's work well.

Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) was a extraordinary Spanish thinker, a philosopher, linguist, poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, professor, university administrator, and Spanish public intellectual. He had great intellectual integrity and moral courage. Unamuno is not an easy philosopher to read. He loved paradoxes and even (at times) contradictions. Various interpreters have called him an atheist, a sceptic, a Protestant, a pantheist, a Catholic modernist, and a good Catholic. Passages can be found in his writings that can be taken to support all of these interpretations. In the present book, Jan E. Evans does an incisive and thorough job of sorting through the Unamuno corpus and arriving at a definitive interpretation of his views.One great asset of Evans' work is the insight she gains by comparing Unamuno's works with the philosophers whom he admired most and considered his fellow travellers in the tragic sense of life. These include Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), William James (1842-1910), and especially Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). This book examines the life and work of Unamuno through the lens of his faith. Those who are not familiar with Unamuno will find here a clear exposition of the most important themes in the thinker's work along with a framework through which one can profitably begin to read his primary texts.

A newly discovered treatise by a major European writer

This book provides a coherent and systematic analysis of Miguel de Unamuno’s notion of religious faith and the reasoning he offers in defense of it. Unamuno developed a non-cognitivist Christian conception of religious faith, defending it as being something which we are all naturally lead to, given our (alleged) most basic and natural inclination to seek an endless existence. Illuminating the philosophical relevance this conception still has to contemporary philosophy of religion, Oya draws connections with current non-cognitivist notions of religious faith in general, and with contemporary religious fictionalist positions more particularly. The book includes a biographical introduction to Miguel de Unamuno, as well as lucid and clear analyses of his notions of the ‘tragic feeling of life’, his epistemological paradigm, and his naturally founded religious fictionalism. Revealing links to current debates, Oya shows how the works of Unamuno are still relevant and enriching today

A central figure of Spanish culture and an author in many genres, Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) is less well known outside Spain. He was a surprising writer and thinker: a professor of Greek who embraced metafiction and modernist methods, a proponent of Castilian Spanish although born in the Basque Country and influenced by many international writers, and an early existentialist who was yet religious. He found himself in opposition to both King Alfonso XIII and the military dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera and then became involved in the political upheaval that led to the Spanish Civil War. Part 1 of this volume, "Materials," gives information on different editions and translations of Unamuno's works, on scholarly and critical secondary sources, and on Web resources. The essays in part 2, "Approaches," offer suggestions for introducing students to the range of his works--novels, essays, poetry, and drama--in Spanish language and literature, comparative literature, religion, and philosophy classrooms.

In recent years the Christian faith has been challenged by skeptics, including the New Atheists, who claim that belief in God is simply not reasonable. Here prominent Christian philosopher C. Stephen Evans offers a fresh, contemporary, and nuanced response. He makes the case for belief in a personal God through an exploration of natural "signs," which open our minds to theistic possibilities and foster belief in the Christian revelation. Evans then discusses why God's self-revelation is both authoritative and authentic. This sophisticated yet accessible book provides a clear account of the evidence for Christian faith, concluding that it still makes sense to believe.

The long tradition of Kierkegaard studies has made it impossible for individual scholars to have a complete overview of the vast field of Kierkegaard research. The large and ever increasing number of publications on Kierkegaard in the languages of the world can be simply bewildering even for experienced scholars. The present work constitutes a systematic bibliography which aims to help students and researchers navigate the seemingly endless mass of publications. The volume is divided into two large sections. Part I, which covers Tomes I-V, is dedicated to individual bibliographies organized according to specific language. This includes extensive bibliographies of works on Kierkegaard in some 41 different languages. Part II, which covers Tomes VI-VII, is dedicated to shorter, individual bibliographies organized according to specific figures who are in some way relevant for Kierkegaard. The goal has been to create the most exhaustive bibliography of Kierkegaard literature possible, and thus the bibliography is not limited to any specific time period but instead spans the entire history of Kierkegaard studies.

Traditional philosophizing has generally depended upon reason as its primary access to truth. Subjective experiences such as feelings, the passions, and emotions have typically been viewed as secondary to reason, untrustworthy, or both. The Religious Existentialists and the Redemption of Feeling revisits how the movement of existentialism, via the religious existentialists, has contributed to a rethinking of the role of subjective experience, in contrast to the rationalist and idealist traditions, thus reframing the importance of feelings in general for the philosophical enterprise as a whole. Through the considerations of a variety of thinkers, this collection provides a fresh look at the contributions of twentieth-century existentialists, thereby re-contextualizing the very notion of existentialism, offering a powerful and genuine re-evaluation of the significance of subjectivity, and underscoring the continued relevance of the religious existentialists.