Dr Guy Bennett-Hunter (BA, MA, MSc, PhD, FRSA, GMBPsS)
Executive Editor, Expository Times
Contact details
Address
- Street
-
New College
Mound Place - City
- Edinburgh
- Post code
- EH1 2LX
Background
Dr. Guy Bennett-Hunter is a philosopher specializing in existential phenomenology and philosophy of religion. He has held research and teaching positions at the universities of Durham, Edinburgh, and Aberdeen and is the author of Ineffability and Religious Experience (2014), published by Routledge. Dr. Bennett-Hunter is Executive Editor of the Expository Times, a leading international journal of religious studies, published monthly since October, 1889. His research interests are in the following areas:
- Ineffability
- Philosophy of Religion
- Phenomenology and Existentialism
- Aesthetics
Dr. Bennett-Hunter is also a qualified mental health professional and works clinically as a BPS-Registered Psychological Wellbeing Practitioner in forensic settings in the North East of England.
Qualifications
2020: MSc (with distinction), Psychology, University of East London.
2011: PhD, Selwyn College, University of Cambridge.
2008: MA (with distinction), Philosophy, University of Durham.
2006: BA (Hons.), Philosophy and Theology, University of Durham.
Responsibilities & affiliations
Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA).
Graduate Member of the British Psychological Society (GMBPsS) (499522; PWP0845).
Book
- Ineffability and Religious Experience (Oxford: Routledge, 2014).
"This book is badly needed in a rather unusual sense because it attends to such a neglected topic. Philosophers have long concentrated on linguistic forms in a way that has isolated language from the rest of life, and this isolation has increasingly obscured for them the vast range of things that cannot be spoken. During the last century, too, English-speaking analytic philosophy has carried this isolation to disastrous lengths on various topics, but above all in the philosophy of religion. Bennett-Hunter is not the first philosopher to try and map this distracted field, but he is remarkable in the width of his approach and his sympathetic approach to the highly various thinkers whom he invokes to illuminate it." —Mary Midgley
Articles discussing the book:
'Ineffability and Religious Experience: A Symposium' appeared in Philosophia, 44.4 (2016): 1247–1287:
- Thaddeus Metz, 'Is Life’s Meaning Ultimately Unthinkable?: Guy Bennett-Hunter on the Ineffable', Philosophia, 44.4 (2016): 1247–1256.
- David E. Cooper, 'Music, Nature and Ineffability', Philosophia, 44.4 (2016): 1257–1266.
- Guy Bennett-Hunter, 'Ineffability: Reply to Professors Metz and Cooper', Philosophia, 44.4 (2016): 1267–1287.
Selected Journal Articles and Essays
- ‘A Report on the Edinburgh Gifford Lectures 2024’, Expository Times, 135.9 (2024): 363–365 [read online].
- ‘Therefore, Socrates is a Philosopher [A Dialogue]’, Philosophy Now, 158 (October/November, 2023): 64–66 [read online].
- ‘Mysticism, Ritual, and the Meaning of Life’, in Iddo Landau (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Meaning in Life (Oxford: OUP, 2022).
- 'And Finally… Talking to Theologians', Expository Times, 132.5 (2021): 247–8 [read draft online].
- ‘Wittgensteinian Quasi-Fideism and Interreligious Communication’, in G. Andrejč & D. Weiss (eds), Interpreting Interreligious Relations with Wittgenstein: Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 157–173.
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‘Mondrian and Neo-Calvinism’, review essay of Classic Mondrian in Neo-Calvinist View: The Watson Gordon Lecture 2017, by Joseph Mashek, Expository Times 131.1 (2019): 20–23 [read draft online].
- ‘Is the Sacred Older than the Gods?’, in ‘Aesthetics, Nature and Religion: Ronald W. Hepburn and His Legacy’, special issue, Journal of Scottish Thought, 10 (2018): 13–25; also published in E. Szécsényi (ed.), Religious and Aesthetic Experience: Ronald W. Hepburn and his Legacy (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 2020) [read article online; read issue online].
- ‘Ritual Practices: An Emergentist Perspective’, Expository Times, 129.2 (2017): 53–61.
- ‘Ineffability: Reply to Professors Metz and Cooper’, Philosophia, 44.4 (2016): 1267–1287 [read online].
- ‘New Work on Ineffability’, review essay of Ineffability and Its Metaphysics: The Unspeakable in Art, Religion, and Philosophy, by Silvia Jonas, Expository Times 128.1 (2016): 30–32 [read online].
- ‘Editorial: "Controversial but Never Ignored”—John Hick and Vito Mancuso’, Expository Times 128.1 (2016): 1–3 [read online].
- ‘Paul Tillich and Divine Ineffability’, in Mireille Hébert & Anne Marie Reijnen (éd.), Paul Tillich et Karl Barth: Antagonismes et accords théologiques (Zürich: LIT Verlag, 2016), 79–92.
- 'Divine Ineffability’, Philosophy Compass 10 (2015): 489–500 [read online].
- ‘Emergence, Emergentism and Pragmatism’, Theology and Science 13.3 (2015): 305–324 [read online].
- 'Pragmatism Applied’, review essay of Believing and Acting: The Pragmatic Turn in Comparative Religion and Ethics, by G. Scott Davis, Expository Times, 126.7 (2015): 334–335 [read online].
- ‘The Imagination in the Travel Literature of Xavier de Maistre and its Philosophical Significance’, in Garth Lean, Russell Staiff and Emma Warterton (eds.), Travel and Imagination (Oxford: Routledge, 2014), 75–88.
- ‘Natural Theology and Literature’, in Russell Re Manning (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 551–565.
- ‘A Pragmatist Conception of Certainty: Wittgenstein and Santayana’, in Christiane Chauviré and Sabine Plaud (eds.), ‘Wittgenstein and Pragmatism: a Reassessment’, special issue, European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, IV.2 (2012): 146–157 [download .pdf].
- ‘Heidegger on Philosophy and Language’, Philosophical Writings, 35 (2007): 5–16 [read online].
Other Writing
Book Reviews
- ‘Review: Philosophy of Religion: A Very Short Introduction, by Tim Bayne’, Expository Times, 130.10 (2019): 465–466 [read online].
- ‘Review: New Models of Religious Understanding, by Fiona Ellis (ed.)’, The Philosophical Quarterly, 69.275 (2019): 429–432 [read draft online].
- ‘Review: Nothingness and the Meaning of Life: Philosophical Approaches to Ultimate Meaning Through Nothing and Reflexivity, by Nicholas Waghorn’, Journal of Moral Philosophy, 15.2 (2018): 221–224 [read online].
- ‘Review: Ineffability: An Exercise in Comparative Philosophy of Religion, ed. T. D. Knepper & L. E. Kalmanson’, Expository Times, 129.6 (2018): 273 [read online].
- ‘Review: The Beginning of Philosophy, by Hans-Georg Gadamer’, Phenomenological Reviews (2017) [read online].
- ‘Review: Philosophy in a Meaningless Life: A System of Nihilism, Consciousness, and Reality, by James Tartaglia’, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (2016.04.05) [read online].