J’essaie d’explorer la vision religieuse d’Euripide en le considérant comme un penseur en même temps qu’un artiste, ou mieux, comme un auteur qui soulève en artiste des questions essentielles sur le sens de l’existence humaine par rapport à celle des dieux, non pas tellement en mettant dans la bouche de ses personnages certaines doxai, mais plutôt en les faisant parler et agir d’une certaine façon dans une situation dramatique particulière. En me détachant aussi bien des savants qui ont vu dans (...) Euripide un défenseur de la tradition religieuse, que de ceux qui ont tendance à déconstruire ses figures des dieux dans un jeu de projections de la psychologie humaine, je soutiens qu’Euripide a mis en question dès le début la consistance des croyances traditionnelles, avec une inquiétude grandissante qui a abouti, sinon à une négation de l’existence des dieux, du moins à une attitude exaspérée de doute sur leur rôle dans l’existence humaine : ce qui est suffisant pour qu’il puisse être compté parmi les auteurs que Platon accuse d’impiété dans le livre X des Lois. (shrink)

Oedipus the tyrant and the limits of political rationalism -- Blind faith and enlightened statesmanship in Oedipus at colonus -- The pious heroism of Antigone -- Conclusion: Nietzsche, Plato, and Aristotle on philosophy and tragedy.

Wittgenstein avait, pourrait-on dire, une « sensibilité religieuse ». Dans un essai vaste et perspicace sur Wittgenstein et la religion, Peter Winch a décrit l’attitude de Wittgenstein à l’égard de la vie ainsi que son regard sur sa propre vie d’une façon qui met en lumière leur caractère religieux [Winch 1994, p. 109-110]. Mais il n’est pas aisé de voir clairement quelles furent les opinions de Wittgenstein au sujet de la religion et de la croyance religieuse, opinions qui, de fait, (...) changère... (shrink)

Cet article examine l’attitude de Socrate tel qu’il se présente dans les dialogues platoniciens, face à la religion officielle d’Athènes. Ensuite, nous présentons les positions adoptées par Platon dans ses cités idéales concernant les citoyens qui s’écartent des attitudes religieuses établies par la loi. Enfin, nous mettons en évidence les similitudes et les différences entre Socrate et Platon sur les rapports entre la religion publique et les croyances personnelles. Contrairement aux avis courants, nous défendons l’idée que Platon est resté fidèle (...) du début jusqu’à la fin de son oeuvre aux principes socratiques concernant le divin. En fait, dans ses cités idéales, Platon « renverse » les rôles : les croyances de Socrate, définies dialectiquement par le logos, deviennent le fondement de la législation et sont les seules acceptées officiellement.Public Religion and personal beliefs. Plato against Socrates? The present paper examines first Socrates’ attitude towards the official religion of Athens, as it appears in the Platonic dialogues. We then analyse Plato’s position concerning the citizens who diverged from the religious representations established by law in the ideal cities. Finally, we formulate what we consider to be the similarities and differences between Socrates and Plato himself concerning the relations between public religion and personal beliefs. Against the current interpretations, we defend the idea that Plato conserved from the beginning till the end of his work his devotion to Socratic principles concerning divinity. In fact, in the ideal cities Plato “reverses” the roles: the intimate convictions of Socrates regarding the gods, defined dialectically by the logos, become the foundation of legislation and are the only ones officially accepted. (shrink)

The paper criticizes John Caputo's formulation of "radical hermeneutics" and its understanding of both religion and tragedy, arguing that a "tragic theology" would be a truly radical hermeneutic.

La rencontre entre Socrate et le tribunal populaire d’Athènes est comparable à la rencontre entre le poète polythéiste Baal et le Prophète dans les Versets sataniques de Salman Rushdie : la piété des uns est l’impiété des autres. Dans l’Apologie, Socrate ne repousse à aucun moment l’accusation selon laquelle il ne croit pas aux dieux auxquels croit la cité, et le dieu dont il se dit le fidèle est très différent d’Apollon tel qu’on se le représente traditionnellement. En fait, (...) une grande partie de sa plaidoirie, et une grande partie de ce qu’il dit d’une façon plus théorique dans l’Euthyphron, est une offense à la religion traditionnelle. En ce sens il était bien coupable de ce dont on l’avait accusé. (shrink)

Penser l'expression de la croyance religieuse, la saisir en tant qu'acte de parole, expression qui soit conjointement langage et action, tel est l'objectif de cet ouvrage collectif. À travers des contributions issues d'horizons divers mais complémentaires, mobilisant en particulier les ressources de l'anthropologie sociale, de la philosophie du langage et de la phénoménologie radicale, l'ouvrage présente l'acte de dire la croyance religieuse selon ses dimensions constitutives, telles que son adresse, son énonciation ou sa réception. Décrire l'acte de dire la croyance, (...) c'est en effet replacer cet acte face à une réalité qu'il désigne et le réinsérer dans les pratiques d'un locuteur qui l'énonce et d'un interlocuteur qui le reçoit, que ce soit un individu ou une communauté. (shrink)

The trajectory of Paul Ricoeur’s thought from the fallible to the capable human person offers a hopeful vision of human nature constitutive of our shared political life. Yet, by necessity, hope arises in response to the tragic, which also features in Ricoeur’s work at the existential and ethical levels. At the same time hope and tragedy represent concepts at the limit of philosophical reasoning, introducing meeting points with religious discourse. Exploring those meeting points reveals the contribution of religious thinking to (...) the understanding of hope and tragedy and establishes Ricoeur’s political thinking as ultimately shaped by their interplay. (shrink)

The caesura of tragedy, more precisely tragedy as the scene of a caesura upon which an interruption occurs in the relation between divine grounds and human will, stands at the center of Susan Taubes's confrontation with tragedy. Moving beyond an explication of generic history, she analyzed the “Nature of Tragedy” (1953) as a phenomenon emerging from a cultural-historical threshold situation, illuminating tragedy's origins in the framework of her approach to ritual, religion, and philosophy. In respect to the history of theory, (...) these reflections are located at a transition point between religious and cultural history. Her argument that tragedy maintains a…. (shrink)

The object of this paper is partly to plead a cause, partly to proclaim a grievance. The last domain of ancient Greek life to attract the serious attention and study of modern scholars has been that of Greek Religion; and the exposition of it has revealed its many vital points of contact with the moral and spiritual energy and the artistic and poetic monuments of the ancient Hellenic race. An enthusiastic votary of this study might venture to hope that some (...) general acquaintance with its facts and ideas would henceforth be recognized as belonging to the general curriculum of Hellenic culture. But any one merely interested in the good workmanship of the classical commentary ought at least to insist that something more than a general acquaintance with this subject should be regarded by those who set themselves to edit certain portions of the Greek classics as an essential preliminary and as a necessary part of their scholarly equipment. The authors to whom this rule specially applies are Hesiod, Pindar and the Attic Dramatists. A satisfying commentary on Hesiod is still a desideratum; and for such an achievement a long apprenticeship in anthropology and religious studies would be a necessity. (shrink)

Book Reviews Catalin Partenie, Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review/Revue canadienne de philosophie, FirstView Article.

Robert R. Williams offers a bold new account of divergences and convergences in the work of Hegel and Nietzsche. He explores four themes - the philosophy of tragedy; recognition and community; critique of Kant; and the death of God - and explicates both thinkers' critiques of traditional theology and metaphysics.

L’épistémologie des croyances religieuses qui pose la question de la rationalité des croyances peut être mise en question en introduisant des éléments de sciences sociales des religions et vice-versa. Un modèle épistémologique souligne que les croyances peuvent être garanties sans examen réflexif de la part du croyant. Mais dans un contexte pluraliste où la croyance particulière est mise en débat, l’exigence critique d’examen est une condition nécessaire de rationalité. En cela, l’épistémologie retrouve certains aspects de la sociologie de la critique (...) dans sa compréhension des manières de croire. Cependant, l’épistémologie dépasse l’approche de la sociologie pragma- tique car elle ne renonce pas à l’évaluation de la rationalité des croyances religieuses en évaluant les arguments pro et contra. (shrink)

Depuis près de cent cinquante ans, l’essai du mathématicien William Kingdon Clifford intitulé The Ethics of Belief est au centre de la plupart des discussions sur les rapports entre éthique et épistémologie, plus précisément sur les questions d’épistémologie et d’éthique de la croyance religieuse car, même si la croyance religieuse n’est jamais la cible exclusive de Clifford, le contexte de sa rédaction ainsi que la quasi-totalité des exemples pris par Clifford portent sur la religion. On opp...

A-t-on le droit de croire en l'existence de Dieu? Non, répondent ceux qui veulent des preuves. Oui, affirme ce livre, car nous avons le droit de croire même sans justification épistémologique. Cela n'a rien d'intellectuellement honteux, contrairement à ce que disent certains philosophes, en parlant d'une éthique des croyances Une nouvelle question se pose alors : a-t-on le droit de croire avoir reçu une révélation et prétendre connaître ainsi la vérité? Non, répondent ceux pour lesquels la vérité ne peut pas (...) être donnée par Dieu dans la Bible. Oui, affirme ce livre, et, qui plus est, une épistémologie peut défendre la rationalité de notre croyance à la révélation. Dès lors, peut-on faire comme si les affirmations du Credo étaient des fictions? Est-il vrai que la religion est avant tout une affaire pratique et une forme de vie? Non, répond ce livre : les arguments en faveur d'une conception non réaliste de la religion sont faibles ; en revanche, le réalisme théologique peut être défendu. Renouvelant ainsi la traditionnelle question de la relation entre foi et raison, ce livre discute aussi bien les thèses de saint Thomas, de John Locke, du cardinal Newman et de Ludwig Wittgenstein, que celles de philosophes analytiques contemporains de la religion comme Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, Peter van Inwagen ou Linda Zagzebski. (shrink)

In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche expounds on the origins of Greek tragedy and its relevance to the German culture of its time. He declares it to be the expression of a culture which has achieved a delicate but powerful balance between Dionysian insight into the chaos and suffering which underlies all existence and the discipline and clarity of rational Apollonian form. In order to promote a return to these values, Nietzsche critiques the complacent rationalism of late nineteenth-century German culture (...) and makes an impassioned plea for the regenerative potential of the music of Wagner. A wide ranging discussion of the nature of art, science, and religion, The Birth of Tragedy's argument raises important questions about the problematic nature of cultural origins which are still valid today. (shrink)

The novel begins as follows:"Dora Greenfield left her husband because she was afraid of him. She decided six months later to return to him for the same reason. The absent Paul, haunting her with letters and telephone bells and imagined footsteps on the stairs had begun to be the greater torment. Dora suffered from guilt, and with guilt came fear. She decided at last that the persecution of his presence was to be preferred to the persecution of his absence."Murdoch's novel (...) The Bell is about Imber Court. It is a small Anglican religious community of lay people whose lives were transformed, not just by the arrival of a couple of dissimilar visitors, not just by the arrival of a new bell to be installed at Imber Abbey located beyond the lake, but more significantly by the discovery of a centuries-old bell the story of which is engulfed in a terrible legend. (shrink)

'Yes, what is Dionysian? - This book provides an answer - "a man who knows" speaks in it, the initiate and disciple of his god.' The Birth of Tragedy is a book about the origins of Greek tragedy and its relevance to the German culture of its time. For Nietzsche, Greek tragedy is the expression of a culture which has achieved a delicate but powerful balance between Dionysian insight into the chaos and suffering which underlies all existence and the discipline (...) and clarity of rational Apollonian form. In order to promote a return to these values, Nietzsche undertakes a critique of the complacent rationalism of late nineteenth-century German culture and makes an impassioned plea for the regenerative potential of the music of Wagner. In its wide-ranging discussion of the nature of art, science and religion, Nietzsche's argument raises important questions about the problematic nature of cultural origins which are still of concern today. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. (shrink)

Textes de philosophes français et britanniques issus du colloque tenu à l'Université de Nantes en 1998. Ils sont consacrés à la philosophie analytique de la religion et abordent des sujets tels que la nature et la justification des croyances religieuses, la question du mal, celles des preuves de l'existence de Dieu, de la théodicée, du langage religieux, du miracle, de la prière, etc.

"En me donnant un micro pour deux séries d'interventions, l'une sur l'histoire, l'autre sur la religion, France Culture m'a permis de résumer et clarifier les travaux que je mène depuis maintes années sur diverses affaires temporelles et spirituelles. Je ne saurais assez remercier sa directrice Sandrine Treiner de m'avoir ainsi donné l'occasion d'apporter ma petite pierre à l'édifice des Lumières, sous l'égide de la devise : Rendre la Raison populaire. Vaste programme, qui exige d'inquiéter nombre de lieux communs, ce qui (...) n'est jamais plaisant. Pourquoi? Parce que nous nous berçons de mots, toujours les mêmes, et que ces mots nous trompent. L'histoire? Elle est censée nous découvrir la réalité des choses : elle nous dorlote avec de fausses croyances. Les religions? Elles sont censées nous raconter des blagues : bombes et couteaux nous découvrent de rudes vérités. Et si l'opium du peuple n'était pas là où l'on pensait? C'est à renverser de vétustes perspectives qu'invite ce récapitulatif, dérangeant comme un réveille-matin". Régis Debray. (shrink)

Jacques Bouveresse a examiné les pensées de Russell et Wittgenstein sur la religion. Elles sont bien évidemment très différentes comme il le montre très bien. A partir d’une discussion de ce que l’on peut attendre d’une épistémologie des croyances religieuses, je propose une critique de la thèse évidentialiste de Russell et des remarques sur la croyance religieuse de Wittgenstein. Les deux philosophes font des erreurs opposées mais finalement identiques quant à leur incompréhension des croyances religieuses et de leur dignité épistémologique.

First published in 1953, Tragedy and the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall argues that our response to tragedy is made up of a series of responses: the impact of experience which produces the archetypes of belief; the formation of the archetype of rebirth; the crystallization of the archetype of rebirth in the myth and ritual of the ancient Near East; the transformation of myth and ritual in the religions of the ancient world, including Christianity; the formalization of the archetype of (...) rebirth into the concept of felix culpa, the paradox of the fortunate fall and finally the secular utilization of the paradox of the fortunate fall as the substance out of which tragedy is made. This book will be of interest to students of literature, philosophy and history. (shrink)

During this period he also published Four Dissertations: The Natural History of Religion, Of the Passions, Of Tragedy, Of the Standard of Taste. These works aroused controversy in the religious community before they became public. Early copies were passed around, and someone of influence threatened to prosecute Hume's publisher if the book was distributed as it was. Hume deleted two essays and removed some particularly offensive passages, then published the book to moderate success. But the larger success of History of (...) England restored Hume's reputation and provided him with the income he needed to live comfortably. (shrink)

Textes de philosophes français et britanniques issus du colloque tenu à l'Université de Nantes en 1998. Ils sont consacrés à la philosophie analytique de la religion et abordent des sujets tels que la nature et la justification des croyances religieuses, la question du mal, celles des preuves de l'existence de Dieu, de la théodicée, du langage religieux, du miracle, de la prière, etc.

In recent years much attention has been devoted to Hegel’s interpretation of Greek tragedy. To be sure, authors dealing with Hegel’s understanding of tragedy have adopted different perspectives. However they do share one common basic assumption, namely, that tragedy plays a crucial role in shaping some key features of Hegel’s philosophy. This article pursues along these lines, and demonstrates that tragedy, or some aspects of tragedy, reinterpreted and reformulated, inform Hegel’s theory of ethical agency. It performs this task on the (...) basis of a reading of Hegel’s early essay The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate. (shrink)

In recent years much attention has been devoted to Hegel’s interpretation of Greek tragedy. To be sure, authors dealing with Hegel’s understanding of tragedy have adopted different perspectives. However they do share one common basic assumption, namely, that tragedy plays a crucial role in shaping some key features of Hegel’s philosophy. This article pursues along these lines, and demonstrates that tragedy, or some aspects of tragedy, reinterpreted and reformulated, inform Hegel’s theory of ethical agency. It performs this task on the (...) basis of a reading of Hegel’s early essay The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate. (shrink)

The following paper analyzes the effect of the Shakespearean text—and Hamlet in particular—on Levinas’s thought. I argue that Levinas’s reading of Shakespeare’s Hamlet played a decisive role in one of the most crucial phenomenological debates to be found in the Levinasian text, namely, the debate with Heidegger on the meaning of death and on the object of Angst (anguish). Analyzing Levinas’s remarks on Hamlet in his philosophical text, this article demonstrates how Shakespeare inspires Levinas’s anti-Heideggerian thesis about anguish being anguish (...) before eternity (and not anguish before death). Moreover, this article analyzes the Hecuba scene from the perspective of Levinas’s philosophy of substitution (where again Shakespeare occupies a central role), and tries to understand the situation of Shakespeare’s tragedy as being “beyond tragedy.”. (shrink)

Résumé — La controverse religieuse qui a suivi l’essor du luthéranisme est ordinairement présentée comme le moteur principal de la reviviscence du pyrrhonisme à l’âge moderne. Au XVIe siècle, la religion aurait fait du pyrrhonisme un outil apologétique puissant, véritable arme que s’opposeraient les diverses confessions. Pourtant, comme le note Bayle dans son Dictionnaire, les rapports entre le scepticisme et la théologie sont extrêmement ambigus : un rapide tableau des appréciations portées par les théologiens chrétiens montrent que, chez les Réformés (...) comme chez les catholiques, l’humiliation des lumières naturelles est pensée comme une entrave à l’instauration de la foi. Seuls les courants pauliniens et mystiques voient dans cette philosophie un moyen bénéfique à la vie spirituelle. Pour devenir un outil intellectuel reconnu dans les milieux catholiques tridentins, le pyrrhonisme a dû subir une métamorphose radicale : Omer Talon, suivi par Gentian Hervet, ont reconfiguré le pyrrhonisme à partir du modèle probabiliste de la Nouvelle Académie, pourtant récusé par Sextus Empiricus. Assoupli, le scepticisme a alors été pensé comme le moyen privilégié d’une refondation de la dialectique rationaliste et de la défense de la foi.— The religious controversy which followed the development of Lutheranism is usually presented as the main engine of the revivescence of the Pyrrhonism in early modern period. In the sixteenth century, religion would have made by Pyrrhonism a powerful apologetic tool, true weapon that adverse confessions would have set against each other. Nevertheless, as Bayle notes it in its Dictionary, the connection between scepticism and theology is extremely ambiguous : a fast outline of the appreciations carried by the Christian theologians shows that, by protestants as well as by Catholics, the humiliation of natural lights is thought as an obstacle of the institution of faith. Only the Paulinian and mystic currents see in such a philosophy a beneficial resource for spiritual life. To become an intellectual tool recognized in the catholic Tridentin circles, Pyrrhonism must have been subjected to a radical transformation : Omer Talon, followed by Gentian Hervet, has restructured Pyrrhonism from the probabilistic model of the New Academy, even though such a model was rejected by Sextus Empiricus. Such mitigated, scepticism has then been considered as one of the privileged means of the refondation of rationalistic dialectic, and of the defence of faith. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Economy, Society, Tragedy: Moral Reflections in an Age of Crisis and Austerity LOUIS A. RUPRECHT JR. Precisely their tragedies prove that the Greeks were not pessimists... In this sense, I have the right to understand myself as the first tragic philosopher—that is to say, the most extreme antithesis and antipode of a pessimistic philosopher. —Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, “The Birth of Tragedy” Orgiastic religion leads most readily to song and (...) music; ritualistic religion inclines toward the pictorial arts; religions enjoining love favor the development of poetry and music. In all of this, the one important fact for us is the significance of the marked rejection of all distinctively aesthetic devices by those religions which are rational, in our special sense. —Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion tragedy and society The title of this review essay is taken from Max Weber’s posthumous magnum opus, Economy and Society,1 an ambitious and wide-ranging comparative sociological analysis of economic orders, social orders and the normative structures that both emerge from and lend meaning to the intersecting economic, political and religious spheres in which complex human arion 28.2 fall 2020 Kathryn A. Kozaitis, Indebted: An Ethnography of Despair and Resilience in Greece’s Second City (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2021), 248 pages. This book is the fifteenth in Oxford’s important series, “Issues of Globalization: Case Studies in Contemporary Anthropology,” edited by Carla Freeman and Li Zhang. 138 economy, society, tragedy societies take shape. To Weber’s grand and capacious sociological categories, economy and society, I have added a third literary and philosophical term: tragedy. Now, to be sure, Weber thought a great deal about tragedy,2 and was drawn to tragic themes in many of his most salient and influential sociological studies. One need think only of his account of the bureaucratic “routinization” of prophetic charisma in The Sociology of Religion,3 or his depiction of modern humanity’s self-imposed “iron cage” in the rousing final pages of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,4 a text to which I will return at the end of this essay.5 But tragedy entails far more than systemic collapse or self-inflicted disaster. In this essay, I want to explore some of the implications of combining close attention to the lived experience of concrete individuals to the highly theoretical, systems-level analysis inspired by such Weberian categories. Put another way, how may Cultural Anthropology, and more specifically Ethnography, deepen such a globally-oriented Sociology? Here, I intend to supplement Weber’s sociological dyad, economy and society, with a conception of tragedy drawn from the cognate social sciences of Comparative Religion and Cultural Anthropology; I will be using Attic Greek tragedy as a benchmark. More specifically, I wish to highlight some of the ways in which the first book-length ethnographic study of the Greek economic crisis may add vital nuance to Weber’s more theoretical, world-systems approach. That book is Kathryn Kozaitis’s Indebted: An Ethnography of Despair and Resilience in Greece’s Second City, an ethnographic study of the lived reality of Greeks experiencing the double -whammy of a sovereign debt crisis and externally imposed austerity regimes in the Greek city of Thessaloniki; the book is the fifteenth to appear inOxford’s “Issues of Globalization: Case Studies in Contemporary Anthropology” series, edited by Carla Freeman and Li Zhang. As Kozaitis demonstrates with sensitivity and eloquence, by zeroing in on the people, rather than the economic policies or the social and administrative structures, Louis A. Ruprecht Jr. 139 certain normative categories and ethical stances become more relevant, many of them implicated in ancient Greek tragedy, and drama more broadly. tragic crises appropriately to a work of cultural ethnography, Kozaitis links the personal to her profession; further still, she weaves her own personal story into the story of the people to whom she is attempting to give voice. This, she notes, constitutes “the auto-ethnography in this ethnography” (4–6). How, then, did this professor of Cultural Anthropology, based in the United States, find her way to Greece’s “second city”? The path was circuitous, and its destination unclear for quite some time. That Kozaitis’s personal... (shrink)

This article addresses the problem of “eco‐anxiety” by integrating results from numerous fields of inquiry. Although climate change may cause direct psychological and existential impacts, vast numbers of people already experience indirect impacts in the form of depression, socio‐ethical paralysis, and loss of well‐being. This is not always evident, because people have developed psychological and social defenses in response, including “socially constructed silence.” I argue that this situation causes the need to frame climate change narratives as emphasizing hope in the (...) midst of tragedy. Framing the situation simply as a threat or a possibility does not work. Religious communities and the use of methods which include spirituality have an important role in enabling people to process their deep emotions and existential questions. I draw also from my experiences from Finland in enabling cooperation between natural scientists and theologians in order to address climate issues. (shrink)