What does it mean to have a distinctively religious orientation toward reality? Martin J. De Nys offers a philosophy of religion grounded within the phenomenological tradition as a way to understand religious life. Focusing on the key concepts of sacred transcendence, religious discourse, and radical self-transcendence, De Nys contends that a phenomenological view of religion allows considerable diversity in regard to the possibility of religious truth. Phenomenology also helps to account for the dizzying variety of religious expressions and religious (...) lifeways. Ultimately, De Nys reaches a universal and complete method of describing a philosophical approach to religious life. This compelling book plays a valuable role in describing human engagement with religion. (shrink)

The ethical theory discoverable in Hegel’s writings assigns, on Dean Moyar’s reading, an important role to the idea of conscience. Hegel’s discussion of conscience presents a theory of practical reasoning which requires that one be able to nest the particular purposes that motivate one’s actions in the objective purposes that have normative status insofar as they prevail in the institutions of modern ethical life. Those norms are legitimized by the fact that the institutions in question, most especially the state, predicate (...) themselves on their recognition of the rights of the particular individual. Individuals are not simply passive in relation to ethical, institutional norms. Individual moral deliberation plays a key role in the ethical development of society. Nonetheless, the norms that the state requires the individual to recognize do seem to be, in the last analysis, beyond appeal. Hegel makes, and Moyar presents, a powerful case for this position. Nonetheless, pacifist arguments present this position with a serious challenge. (shrink)

Can the conception of God in Hegel’s philosophy of religion provide a resource for current philosophical theology? The argument in William Desmond’sHegel’s God: A Counterfeit Double? entails a strongly negative response. Desmond argues that the basic commitments of Hegel’s speculative philosophyentail a systematic inability adequately to conceive of divine transcendence. In this article, I address this claim by examining Hegel’s conception of God inrelation to the issues of (i) the religious representation and the philosophical concept, (ii) the nature of speculative (...) thinking and the conception of God, (iii) the idea of creation, and (iv) affirming the truth about divine transcendence. In each case I argue that Desmond’s critique is unwarranted. A more appropriate attitude towards Hegel on the question of God combines critique with an effort at discovering and appropriating philosophical principles that are productive for current philosophical theology. (shrink)

Hegel and Lonergan both make important contributions to the contemporary task of developing philosophical considerations of God within the context of a philosophy of religion. Hegel maintains that philosophy must both present knowledge of God as God is in godself, and present an account of God’s involvement with the human community. One accomplishes this two-sided task, Hegel believes, through the philosophical appropriation of the religious representation. If this appropriation is rightly understood, there is little in it to which Longern should (...) object, and a great deal that he might endorse, given his own views about the relation between philosophy of religion and philosophy of God. At the same time, Lonergan would rightly object to what at times seems at least to be Hegel’s annulment of religious mystery, and the claim Hegel sometimes seems to make that the cognitive achievements of philosophy result in a sublation of the existential concerns of religion. Lonergan argues for positions that make possible important corrections of these problems. (shrink)

IN A DISCUSSION OF ARGUMENTS concerning the existence of God, James Ross comments that we know that the premises of such arguments “are infinitely analysable, that they can be subject to an illimitable series of questions and that every question can be answered in more than one way.” The record of disputes over the “third way” of Aquinas certainly confirms these statements. Those disputes revolve around issues about which questions are continually raised in spite of strenuous attempts made at settling (...) them. An issue often raised on the contemporary scene is the logically simple and philosophically very serious claim that the third way commits a version of the fallacy of composition or a quantifier shift that undermines the legitimacy of the argument. (shrink)

This document translates the most important portion of one of the most important texts which Hegel wrote in Jena prior to the composition of the Phenomenology of Spirit. The quality of the translation, its historical importance, and its philosophical merit make this document a valuable addition to philosophical scholarship.

The renaissance of Hegel studies, now well into its third decade in the United States, has from its beginning included serious efforts to reexamine Hegel's philosophy of religion. These efforts naturally point beyond themselves to investigations into Hegel as a source of productive possibilities for philosophical theology. Hodgson's book is an exemplary instance of such an investigation. It is written with admirable clarity and takes account of a rich variety of texts and traditions. It stands as a critical and insightful (...) retrieval of Hegel's philosophy of religion and of history for the purposes of constructive philosophical theology. (shrink)

This volume collects the papers given at the meeting of the Hegel Society of America held in November, 1972, at the University of Notre Dame. As the editors point out in their Foreword, these papers fall under two general headings, “ Hegel’s conception of the history of philosophy in general, and his relation to individual thinkers both before and after him.” The value of these essays lies not only in their being carefully informative regarding these two themes, although they are (...) this. But there also emerge from reflection upon these essays philosophical problems important to anyone doing philosophy in the Hegelian manner. The following brief review of the essays will depart from the order of the text by considering the second essay first. (shrink)

This book is a careful study of writings by Paul Ricoeur from his early discussions of phenomenology, through the development of his hermeneutic philosophy, to recent texts on the self and the other. Venema identifies the development of a hermeneutical understanding of identity and selfhood as the central issue that belongs to Ricoeur’s work. He discusses the distinct phases that belong to that work, and the specific concerns that Ricoeur comes to address in those phases, in the light of this (...) issue. The hermeneutical treatment of identity and selfhood begins in a critique of Husserlian transcendental phenomenology. Venema develops that critique by focusing, not exclusively but significantly, on the first part of Ideas I. He argues that one finds in transcendental phenomenology claims to a self-transparent and independent ego whose achievements occur with necessity. A critique that discovers immanent problems in these claims is the first step that Ricoeur takes in moving toward a hermeneutical understanding of identity. A second step occurs when Ricoeur focuses on the significance of the imagination. Imagination mediates between the multiplicity of involuntary dispositions and the unifying function of voluntary capacity. It also mediates between the finitude of passive receptivity and the infinite effort to determine what is received with names. This effort, in turn, locates the self in a situation of power over others in a context that nonetheless also calls for the reciprocals constitutions of selves. Venema notes the anomalous character of this position. He claims that it continues to be present in related and basic ways throughout the development of Ricoeur’s work. The analyses of metaphor seriously attempt to exhibit the reciprocity of identity and difference and to contribute to a hermeneutic of reciprocal self-constitution. At the same time, parts of those analyses suggest a primacy of identity over difference in relation to language, selfhood, and Being. This undercuts the claim that selves are constituted through reciprocal relations with each other and with the world. The analyses of narrative uncover an understanding of identity as something that comes about insofar as narrative discourse configures and refigures temporal experience. At the same time the appropriation of narrative possibilities seems to presuppose a voluntary cogito that stands over against the flux of symbolic and narrative discourse. Finally, Ricoeur extends the discussion of identity expressly to include the problem of selfhood. Continuing to define identity in narrative terms, he insists on both the distinction between and the correlation of self-sameness and self-constancy in the identity of the self. However, the way in which his discussions of identity and selfhood combine a semantic analysis of selfreference with a pragmatic analysis of self-designation leads to problems that ultimately render his account of the self’s receptivity of the other inadequate or at least incomplete. (shrink)

The question of the role of juridical conceptions, concepts of justice and rights, in Marx's evaluation of capitalist society, is a major issue in current American Marx scholarship. In this book, Allen Buchanan analyzes many aspects of Marx's social theory in an examination and critique of Marx's views regarding the role of juridical concepts in that theory. His book, as an interpretation of Marx, defends three basic claims. First, Marx's evaluation of capitalist society is a radical and external evaluation of (...) the same, made from the perspective of communist society, which perspective does not include concepts of justice or rights. Communist society is a society in which persons enjoy undistorted consciousness of their needs, in that it abolishes the forms of alienation and exploitation which differently characterize capitalist society and all pre-capitalist societies. Conceived as such, communist society provides an external standard from which capitalism can be radically evaluated. But this evaluation does not include claims to the effect that capitalism is less just or unjust when compared to communist society, or that persons in capitalist society cannot claim rights which they can claim under communism. This is because, second, the very "circumstances of justice," the types of conflicts which lead persons to assert rights claims and appeal to prescriptive rules of justice, are overcome in communist society as Marx conceives it. With this, the very notions of justice and rights wither away under communism. Buchanan argues, against Wood and others, that concepts of justice do operate in Marx's internal critique of capitalism. But they are not at work in his radical and external evaluation of capitalist society, made from the perspective of communist society, because in communist society the circumstances of justice are overcome. For this reason, and this is Buchanan's third interpretive claim, the proletariat for Marx is not motivated towards revolutionary action by notions of justice or rights. Rather, the proletariat acts in a revolutionary way because of its own self-interest in overcoming intolerable conditions of exploitation, and acts towards the goal of bringing into being a type of society in which rights claims and prescriptive rules of justice are impossible because fundamentally unnecessary. (shrink)

This work is an effort at philosophical reconstruction. It endeavors critically to retrieve the idea of reason that belongs to modern philosophy and to phenomenology, in a way that takes account of what Marsh sees as the postmodern challenges to that idea. The reconstruction Marsh proposes takes the form of a "dialectical phenomenology," in which Hegel and Husserl are chastened by each other and by their philosophical successors. Dialectical phenomenology is dialectical in that it roots thinking in historical experience and (...) surpasses "either-or" oppositions in "both-and" mediations. It is phenomenological in its endeavors to secure relative apodicticity for its claims, to recognize differences and relations among distinguishable structures that belong to experience, and to recover an illumining understanding of the life-world in which the self is involved and of the self which is intelligible with reference to worldly involvements. (shrink)

This book examines the conditions which make possible an existentialist social philosophy in the writings of Sartre. At issue, of course, is the question of the legitimacy of Sartre's Marxism. To deal with this question, Flynn focuses on the issue of collective responsibility. Is there, in Sartre's later writings, a social ontology which allows one to assign responsibility to a social ensemble? Can Sartre conceive of collectivities in a way which must be possible for any version of Marxism?

This document translates the most important portion of one of the most important texts which Hegel wrote in Jena prior to the composition of the Phenomenology of Spirit. The quality of the translation, its historical importance, and its philosophical merit make this document a valuable addition to philosophical scholarship.

Quentin Lauer has written a masterful study of the subject indicated by his title. His book draws upon a comprehensive knowledge of Hegel’s writings. It carefully situates Hegel’s writings in their own philosophical context, and also explains the manner in which those writings retrieve classical philosophy and certain aspects of medieval theology and philosophy. It discusses the theology contemporary to Hegel of which he was aware, and his assessments of that theology. It takes account of our contemporary philosophical and theological (...) assessments of Hegel’s views regarding a “concept of God.” But this book not only achieves scholarly and philosophical excellence. It is also a personal investigation of an issue clearly of deep concern to the author. On occasion Lauer makes use of anecdote and personal narrative in developing his exposition. On other occasions he shows that he is quite aware that his book is one which will generate controversy. Indeed it should. The excellence of this work demands that it be taken seriously. The theses which this work propounds will certainly appear controversial to many who labor at Hegel scholarship, and to others who assess Hegel’s views from diverse philosophical and theological standpoints. (shrink)