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The focus of this essay is Meister Eckhart's references in the sixth of his \"Talks on Discernment\" to having an \"equal mind.\" This rather unassuming early metaphor foreshadows many of Eckhart's better-known teachings, such as the \"just man,\" the \"ground of the soul,\" and the \"birth of God in the soul.\" The goal of the essay is to demonstrate the potential of the daily practice of an \"equal mind\" to transform one's view of the \"other,\" and so to neutralize the ultimately and frighteningly destructive tendency in current discourse to polarize and divide.

In his treatise \"On Detachment,\" Meister Eckhart underscores that the detached soul has the power to compel God. This article draws on Eckhart's concept of detachment to explore the gravitational pull that Melville's Bartleby exerts on both the narrator and the other characters in his law practice. In abstaining from the \"common usage\" of the practice and in abandoning \"common sense,\" Bartleby brings to the fore another ground for communal living, although this ground can never be claimed as an individual or collective possession. It is the ground of being, or, in the vocabulary of the tale, the premise that everyone shares provided that it never becomes a property or a predicate. Eckhart's detached soul and Melville's Bartleby are companion figures to the extent that in doing—or preferring to do—nothing they expose the nothingness of all individual inclinations and preferences.

The result is an elaboration of a theory of ethics different from the two dominant modern conceptions: Foucault's ethics of the self and Levinas's ethics of the other. Against the two dominant ethical paradigms of continental philosophy-Emmanuel Levinas's ethics of the Other and Michel Foucault's ethics of self-cultivation-The Self-Emptying Subjecttheorizes an ethics of self-emptying, orkenosis, that reveals the immanence of an impersonal and dispossessed life \"without a why.\" Rather than aligning immanence with the enclosures of the subject,The Self-Emptying Subjectengages the history of Christian mystical theology, modern philosophy, and contemporary theories of the subject to rethink immanence as what precedes and exceeds the very difference between the (human) self and the (divine) other, between the subject and transcendence. By arguing that transcendence operates and subjects life in secular no less than in religious domains, this book challenges the dominant distribution of concepts in contemporary theoretical discourse, which insists on associating transcendence exclusively with religion and theology and immanence exclusively with modern secularity and philosophy. The Self-Emptying Subjectargues that it is important to resist framing the relationship between medieval theology and modern philosophy as a transition from the affirmation of divine transcendence to the establishment of autonomous subjects. Through an engagement with Meister Eckhart, G.W.F. Hegel, and Georges Bataille, it uncovers a medieval theological discourse that rejects the primacy of pious subjects and the transcendence of God (Eckhart); retrieves a modern philosophical discourse that critiques the creation of self-standing subjects through a speculative re-writing of the concepts of Christian theology (Hegel); and explores a discursive site that demonstrates the subjecting effects of transcendence across theological and philosophical operations and archives (Bataille). Taken together, these interpretations suggest that if we suspend the antagonistic relationship between theological and philosophical discourses, and decenter our periodizing assumptions and practices, we might encounter a yet unmapped theoretical fecundity of self-emptying that frees life from transcendent powers that incessantly subject it for their own ends. Dubilet is a very lucid writer who does an excellent job of explaining philosophically sophisticated material without oversimplifying.Recovers a major but neglected concept drawn from Paul's letters, that underlies theories of subjectivity across a wide range of Western thought, from medieval mysticism to Hegel, to Bataille, confounding the conventional religious/secular divide.

By reconstructing the conceptual logic underlying the figure of ‘the just’ found in Meister Eckhart’s sermons, this essay transforms the parameters of what counts as political theology for the medieval period. By giving voice to an uncreated freedom of those who are equal to nothing, Eckhart’s mystic discourse poses an unmarked challenge to the political theologies of sovereignty and subjection. Against the interlinked ruses of individuation, subjection, and salvation, his mystic speech of de-interpellation asserts that justice is lived only in the now, without deferral or justification. By enacting a reading practice of abandon – abandoning not only rigid distributions of textual genre, but also the primacy accorded to the subject and the proper – this essay makes visible an example of the unbearable truth for the political that may be retrieved from mystical texts – a scandal for the orders of legitimation and interpellative subjection around which the logic of the political ceaselessly revolves.

The paper examines how the figure of the biblical Moses was philosophically interpreted in medieval Jewish and Christian writings. It highlights a turning point in a new concept of prophecy and scriptural authority and suggests that this transformation was made complicated for both Jewish and Christian intellectuals by the appearance of Moses Maimonides, who was most influential in promoting the Muslim model of philosophic interpretation of prophecy, and at the same time confusingly emerged as a living manifestation of semi-biblical authority. Against Jewish exclusivist interpretation of Mosaic law as the leading polemical argument to encounter competing revelations, the first part of my paper points out a mechanism of “Jewish successionism”, i.e., the re-interpretation of the biblical Moses as an instrument for rationalizing normative paradigmatic shift. The second, main part of the paper turns to the Latin translation of Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed, placing it in the midst of a crucial western Latin turn into a new phase of engagement with Old Testament concept of prophecy. A short comparison between some prominent twelfth century figures and later Scholastic thought demonstrates the central role of the new Arab Aristotelianism in general, and that of Maimonides in particular. Maimonides reception among the schoolman will culminate in the writings of Meister Eckhart, exposing the full potentiality of the double appearance of the Egyptian (Rabbi) Moses.

This article is designed to form a question-focused cross-cultural dialogue, rather than compare Z hu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200) with Meister Eckhart (1260–1328) in general terms. It will start with an analysis of the exegetical/hermeneutical rules that Z hu Xi and Eckhart set up for their own scriptural commentaries. The study of Eckhart will then be extended to Augustine, in order to explore how Eckhart resorts to Augustine in his commentary writings. Having explored Eckhart’s affinity with Augustine regarding their consensus about the multiplicity of literal senses, as well as their emphasis on the renewal or the continuous growth of the meaning of scriptural texts, the discussion will come back to the starting point of this comparative model, and attempt to form a comparison between the two traditions, through the exemplars of Z hu Xi, Eckhart, and Augustine, with a focus on the implications of these hermeneutical rules.

Der Beitrag widmet sich der Berliner Handschrift Ms. theol. lat. oct. 89, die sich als ein bislang unbekannter Textzeuge des ‘Geistbuchs’ und der Eckhart-Predigt Nr. 95A erwiesen hat. Sie ist von besonderer Bedeutung, weil sie unsere Kenntnisse von der Text- und Überlieferungsgeschichte der beiden, hier nur mit kurzen Exzerpten vertretenen Werke erweitert und einen Blick auf die verschollenen Textbestände der ‘mystischen’ Bibliothek der Erfurter Kartause ermöglicht. This article examines the Berlin manuscript Ms. theol. lat. oct. 89, which proved to be a previously unknown textual witness of the anonymous 14th-century treatise ‘Geistbuch’ and Eckhart, Sermon 95A. The manuscript is of special relevance, since it not only widens our understanding of the textual history and transmission of both texts, contained as short excerpts in Ms. theol. lat. oct. 89, but also brings into view the lost book stock of the ‘mystical’ library of Erfurt charterhouse.

En el presente trabajo presentamos la exposición de Meister Eckhart de la estructura metafísica del mundo creado a través del relevo de algunos pasajes nucleares de su obra, centralmente en el Comentario al Evangelio de Juan. Para ello, en primer lugar buscamos trazar paralelismos entre su argumentación y la presente en el Liber de Causis I.1-I.11 para señalar la impronta de este texto en el pensamiento eckhartiano. En segundo lugar, exponemos el modo abstracto de acceso al orden jerárquico que se edifica entre el esse, el vivere y el intelligere. Finalmente, presentamos el modo concreto, señalando sus particularidades y su distinción respecto al modo abstracto.

Die vorliegende Studie zielt darauf ab, die Metaphysik Meister Eckharts auf systematische Weise darzustellen und das gemeinsame Fundament zu ermitteln, das anzeigt, dass seine spekulativen lateinischen wie auch seine von bildhaften Ausdrucksweisen geprägten deutschen Schriften inhaltlich miteinander vereinbar sind. Das Innovative dieser Studie manifestiert sich darin, dass dieser Versuch der Systematisierung anhand des mittelalterlichen Sprachmodells mit seinen Prädikationsstruktur aufweisenden Sätzen, die zugleich die Grundthesen der Eckhart'schen Metaphysik bilden, vorgenommen wird. Die Prädikation ist gemäß der Inhärenz- oder der Identitätstheorie zu verstehen, dies bei variierendem Satzsinn. Das zeitigt wichtige Folgen für Eckharts Gottesverständnis und seine spezifische Haltung gegenüber der negativen Theologie. Schließlich wird ermittelt, welche Auswirkung die Prädikation auf die Grundsätze seiner Metaphysik besitzt, einer Metaphysik, die, wie exemplarisch gezeigt wird, auch für seine deutschen Schriften konstitutiv ist.This study proposes to present Meister Eckhart's metaphysics in the systematic way and to identify a common fundament which displays that his speculative Latin language and the pictorial expressions used in the German writings are compatible with each other. The innovative aspect of this study is manifested by the attitude of systematization on the basis of the medieval language models. This attitude identifies the way of understanding of Meister Eckhart's sentences which have a predicative structure and are at the same time the main theses of his metaphysics. The predication can be understood according to the inhaerentia-theory or the identity-theory that makes different Senses of a same sentence. It yields the important results for the reception of God according to Eckhart and his specific position to negative theology. In the last part of the book it is presented what an impact the predication has on the main theses of Eckhart's metaphysics, on the metaphysics, which - as it is exemplarily demonstrated - is constitutive also for his German writings.