Online research in philosophy

To date, there have been few attempts to compare the thought of Confucius and Kierkegaard, and these few attempts have focused on the contrast between Kierkegaard’s stress on the individual and Confucius’s emphasis on the social aspect of human existence. In this article, I point instead to substantial agreement between the analyses of ethical existence offered by Confucius and two of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous figures, Judge William of Either/Or and Johannes Climacus of The Concluding Unscientific Postscript . I seek to use (...) this parallelism to better discern the specific character of Confucius’s religious consciousness. (shrink)

John Caputo’s Demythologizing Heidegger represents an important, distinctive, and intriguing attempt to make sense of Heidegger’s notorious involvement with Nazism. Where others have tended to emphasize biographical and sociological factors in understanding Heidegger’s involvement with Nazism, Caputo traces that involvement to fateful turns in Heidegger’s development as a thinker. While I am sympathetic with such an undertaking, I find Caputo’s account highly questionable and even self-opposed, especially as regards hisapparent valorization of Kierkegaard and of biblical faith as influences that could (...) have saved Heidegger from Nazism had he not turned away from them in favor of Nietzsche and the presocratic Greeks. (shrink)

Introduction, by R. A. Markus.--St. Augustine and Christian Platonism, by A. H. Armstrong.--Action and contemplation, by F. R. J. O'Connell.--St. Augustine on signs, by R. A. Markus.--The theory of signs in St. Augustine's De doctrina Christiana, by B. D. Jackson.--Si fallor, sum, by G. B. Matthews.--Augustine on speaking from memory, by G. B. Matthews.--The inner man, by G. B. Matthews.--On Augustine's concept of a person, by A. C. Lloyd.--Augustine on foreknowledge and free will, by W. L. Rowe.--Augustine on free (...) will and predestination, by J. M. Rist.--Time and contingency in St. Augustine, by R. Jordan.--Empiricism and Augustine's problems about time, by H. M. Lacey.--Political society, by P. R. L. Brown.--The development of Augustine's ideas on society before the Donatist controversy, by F. E. Cranz.--De Civitate Dei, XV, 2, and Augustine's idea of the Christian society, by F. E. Cranz.--Chronological table.--Note on further reading (p. [422]-423). (shrink)