This paper examines the problem of ontotheology as it was defined by Martin Heidegger, and how it has subsequently been approached by those philosophers and theologians who have followed in his wake. It argues that Heidegger’s initial analysis of the onto‐theological condition was mistaken by its presumption of a radical divide between philosophy and theology. Furthermore, many of the key thinkers who have followed after Heidegger have merely reinscribed this supposed divide between thought and faith, rather than genuinely questioning the (...) terms Heidegger thought self‐evident. The result, even among some of the most radical and influential contemporary thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas, John Caputo, and Jean‐Luc Marion, has been a contemporary philosophy deprived of questions of faith and a theology unaccountable to its place in the world. In response to this shortcoming of contemporary philosophical and theological thought, Jacques Derrida has approached the problem of ontotheology from the dual perspective of both thought and faith, and thereby, has provided a new path of thought beyond the problem of ontotheology and towards a renewed appreciation for the possibilities for a genuine philosophical theology. (shrink)

Alexis de Tocqueville once wrote that "the people reign over the American political world like God over the universe," unwittingly casting democracy as the political instantiation of the death of God. According to Jeffrey W. Robbins, Tocqueville's assessment remains an apt observation of modern democratic power, which does not rest with a sovereign authority but operates as a diffuse social force. By linking radical democratic theory to a contemporary fascination with political theology, Robbins envisions the modern experience (...) of democracy as a social, cultural, and political force transforming the nature of sovereign power and political authority. Robbins joins his work with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's radical conception of "network power," as well as Sheldon Wolin's notion of "fugitive democracy," to fashion a political theology that captures modern democracy's social and cultural torment. This approach has profound implications not only for the nature of contemporary religious belief and practice but also for the reconceptualization of the proper relationship between religion and politics. Challenging the modern, liberal, and secular assumption of a neutral public space, Robbins conceives of a postsecular politics for contemporary society that inextricably links religion to the political. While effectively recasting the tradition of radical theology as a political theology, this book also develops a comprehensive critique of the political theology bequeathed by Carl Schmitt. It marks an original and visionary achievement by the scholar the _Journal of the American Academy of Religion_ hailed "one of the best commentators on religion and postmodernism.". (shrink)

Alexis de Tocqueville once wrote that "the people reign over the American political world like God over the universe," unwittingly casting democracy as the political instantiation of the death of God. According to Jeffrey W. Robbins, Tocqueville's assessment remains an apt observation of modern democratic power, which does not rest with a sovereign authority but operates as a diffuse social force. By linking radical democratic theory to a contemporary fascination with political theology, Robbins envisions the modern experience (...) of democracy as a social, cultural, and political force transforming the nature of sovereign power and political authority. Robbins joins his work with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's radical conception of "network power," as well as Sheldon Wolin's notion of "fugitive democracy," to fashion a political theology that captures modern democracy's social and cultural torment. This approach has profound implications not only for the nature of contemporary religious belief and practice but also for the reconceptualization of the proper relationship between religion and politics. Challenging the modern, liberal, and secular assumption of a neutral public space, Robbins conceives of a postsecular politics for contemporary society that inextricably links religion to the political. While effectively recasting the tradition of radical theology as a political theology, this book also develops a comprehensive critique of the political theology bequeathed by Carl Schmitt. It marks an original and visionary achievement by the scholar the _Journal of the American Academy of Religion_ hailed "one of the best commentators on religion and postmodernism.". (shrink)

"Radical theology" and "political theology" are terms that have gained a lot of currency among philosophers of religion today. In this visionary new book, Jeffrey W. Robbins explores the contemporary direction of these movements as he charts a course for their future. Robbins claims that radical theology is no longer bound by earlier thinking about God and that it must be conceived of as postsecular and postliberal. As he engages with themes of liberation, gender, and race, (...) class='Hi'>Robbins moves beyond the usual canon of death-of-God thinkers, thinking "against" them as much as "with" them. He presents revolutionary thinking in the face of changing theological concepts, from reformation to transformation, transcendence to immanence, messianism to metamorphosis, and from the proclamation of the death of God to the notion of God’s plasticity. (shrink)

It has long been assumed that the more modern we become, the less religious we will be. Yet a recent resurrection in faith has challenged the certainty of this belief. In these original essays and interviews, leading hermeneutical philosophers and postmodern theorists John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo engage with each other's past and present work on the subject and reflect on our transition from secularism to postsecularism. As two of the figures who have contributed the most to the theoretical (...) reflections on the contemporary philosophical turn to religion, Caputo and Vattimo explore the changes, distortions, and reforms that are a part of our postmodern faith and the forces shaping the religious imagination today. Incisively and imaginatively connecting their argument to issues ranging from terrorism to fanaticism and from politics to media and culture, these thinkers continue to reinvent the field of hermeneutic philosophy with wit, grace, and passion. (shrink)

It has long been assumed that the more modern we become, the less religious we will be. Yet a recent resurrection in faith has challenged the certainty of this belief. In these original essays and interviews, leading hermeneutical philosophers and postmodern theorists John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo engage with each other's past and present work on the subject and reflect on our transition from secularism to postsecularism. As two of the figures who have contributed the most to the theoretical (...) reflections on the contemporary philosophical turn to religion, Caputo and Vattimo explore the changes, distortions, and reforms that are a part of our postmodern faith and the forces shaping the religious imagination today. Incisively and imaginatively connecting their argument to issues ranging from terrorism to fanaticism and from politics to media and culture, these thinkers continue to reinvent the field of hermeneutic philosophy with wit, grace, and passion. (shrink)

Introduction: The ontological condition -- The problem of philosophical theology -- Interlude 1, on political boundaries and profit: The path of theology : a study of Dietrich Bonhoeffer -- The path of phenomenology : a study of Edmund Husserl -- Interlude 2, on translations: Phenomenology turned theology -- Interlude 3, on bibliolatry: Otherwise than overcoming -- Postlude: on the feminine and ontotheology.

Richard Rorty is famous, maybe even infamous, for his philosophical nonchalance. His groundbreaking work not only rejects all theories of truth but also dismisses modern epistemology and its preoccupation with knowledge and representation. At the same time, the celebrated pragmatist believed there could be no universally valid answers to moral questions, which led him to a complex view of religion rarely expressed in his writings. In this posthumous publication, Rorty, a strict secularist, finds in the pragmatic thought of John Dewey, (...) John Stuart Mill, William James, and George Santayana, among others, a political imagination shared by religious traditions. His intent is not to promote belief over nonbelief or to blur the distinction between religious and public domains. Rorty seeks only to locate patterns of similarity and difference so an ethics of decency and a politics of solidarity can rise. He particularly responds to Pope Benedict XVI and his campaign against the relativist vision. Whether holding theologians, metaphysicians, or political ideologues to account, Rorty remains steadfast in his opposition to absolute uniformity and its exploitation of political strength. (shrink)

Clayton Crockett and Jeffrey Robbins describe a number of the intellectual developments and movements that preceded and influenced radical theology. They pay special attention to the hermeneutics of suspicion of Feuerbach, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche; the phenomenology of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty; and the linguistic structuralism of Saussure. Crockett and Robbins pay close attention to the role of Derrida’s lecture, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in 1966 before moving on to the (...) Death of God movement. They emphasize the way Tillich’s thought was radicalized by G. Vahanian, Altizer, Daly, and others in combination with Tillich’s theology of culture and existential theology and Bonhoeffer’s influence on the early Death of God thinkers. Finally, Crockett and Robbins discuss radical theology’s hybridization with deconstruction in the work of Raschke, Mark C. Taylor, and Winquist and hybridizing RT with deconstruction. (shrink)

What is the future of Continental philosophy of religion? These forward-looking essays address the new thinkers and movements that have gained prominence since the generation of Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, and Levinas and how they will reshape Continental philosophy of religion in the years to come. They look at the ways concepts such as liberation, sovereignty, and post-colonialism have engaged this new generation with political theology and the new pathways of thought that have opened in the wake of speculative realism and (...) recent findings in neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. Readers will discover new directions in this challenging and important area of philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

An Insurrectionist Manifesto contains four insurrectionary gospels based on Martin Heidegger's philosophical model of the fourfold: earth and sky, gods and mortals. Challenging religious dogma and dominant philosophical theories, they offer a cooperative, world-affirming political theology that promotes new life through not resurrection but insurrection. The insurrection in these gospels unfolds as a series of miraculous yet worldly practices of vital affirmation. Since these routines do not rely on fantasies of escape, they engender intimate transformations of the self along the (...) very coordinates from which they emerge. Enacting a comparative and contagious postsecular sensibility, these gospels draw on the work of Slavoj i ek, Giorgio Agamben, Catherine Malabou, François Laruelle, Peter Sloterdijk, and Gilles Deleuze yet rejuvenate scholarship in continental philosophy, critical race theory, the new materialisms, speculative realism, and nonphilosophy. They think beyond the sovereign force of the one to initiate a radical politics "after" God. (shrink)

Edward Mooney describes Continental philosophy of religion as “marked by labor under the shadow of Nietzsche’s death of God, under the associated threats and realities of loss of unified authors, selves, texts, and ethics, and under the loss of confidence in epistemology, ontology, and representation” . The question this anthology of nineteen essays raises is what this labor may be after the deaths of Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, and Levinas. Is there a future for Continental philosophy of religion? What labor do (...) philosophers who are part of this tradition want to take up? The editors organize the essays to focus on three current directions and select a single guiding concept for each of these directions: the messianic, liberation, and plasticity. Each of these sections is also framed by the work of one philosopher. While this organization is helpful, the book would have benefitted greatly if the editors had developed a concluding essay for each section that pulled the essays int .. (shrink)

PC Wars: Politics and Theory in the Academy addresses the very issue of political correctness and the current skirmishes in the culture wars. It includes statements from many of our leading contemporary public intellectuals, including Joan Wallach Scott, Michael Be;rube;, Bruce Robbins, Henry Giroux, and Gerald Graff. The collection marks a watershed in the debate about "pc" in that it presents serious considerations and analyses of the factors, causes, and consequences of the culture wars. Carefully examining the construction of (...) "pc," PC Wars analyses political correctness by focusing on the mass media, class politics, and the ideology of managerial democracy. It places the disputes around "pc" in the context of contemporary developments in critical and cultural theory and the current backlash against theory, manifested in the recent attacks on Marxism, feminism and deconstruction. The book also scrutinizes the undercurrents of anti-intellectualism and anti-professionalism which have tended to create a fertile ground for the "pc" hysteria. Offering much more than slogans and slinging arrows, PC Wars provides a spirited and critical look at the reaction, ideology, and political forces that have coalesced around the term. Contributors: Michael Be;rube;, Reed Way Dasenbrock, Frank Farmer, Henry Giroux, Gerald Graff, Darlene Hantzis and Devoney Looser, John S. Howard and James M. Lang, Tom Lewis, James Neilson, Christopher Newfield, Richard Ohmann, Burce Robbins, Barry Sarchett, Joan W. Scott, Michael Sprinker, Jeffrey Williams. (shrink)

Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 47, Issue 2, Page 208-254, Spring 2019.

The proposal that the criminal justice system should focus on rehabilitation – rather than retribution, deterrence, or expressive denunciation – is among the least popular ideas in legal philosophy. Foremost among rehabilitation’s alleged weaknesses is that it views criminals as blameless patients to be treated, rather than culpable moral agents to be held accountable. This article offers a new interpretation of the rehabilitative approach that is immune to this objection and that furnishes the moral foundation that this approach has lacked. (...) The view rests on the principle that moral agents owe it to one another to maintain the dependability of their moral capacities. Agents who culpably commit criminal wrongs, however, betray an unacceptable degree of moral unreliability. Punishment, on this theory, consists in the enforcement of the duties that offenders have to reduce their own likelihood of recidivism. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

Scientists’ identities and social locations influence their work, but the content of scientific work can also influence scientists. Theory from feminist science studies, autoethnographic accounts, interviews, and experiments indicate that the substance of scientific research can have profound effects on how scientists are treated by colleagues and their sense of belonging in science. I bring together these disparate literatures under the framework of professional cultures. Drawing on the Survey of Earned Doctorates and the Web of Science, I use computational social (...) science tools to argue that the way scientists write about sex in their research influences the future gender ratio of PhDs awarded across 53 subfields of the life sciences over a span of 47 years. Specifically, I show that a critical paradigm of “feminist biology” that seeks to de-essentialize sex and gender corresponds to increases in women’s graduation rates, whereas “sex difference” research—sometimes called “neurosexism” because of its emphasis on essential, categorical differences—corresponds to decreases in women’s graduation rates in most fields. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.1 (2002) 22-49 [Access article in PDF] Kenneth Burke: A Dialogue of Motives Jeffrey W. Murray [Figures] Introduction In "Four Master Tropes," Appendix D of A Grammar of Motives (1969a), Kenneth Burke investigates the tropes of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. His "primary concern with them... [is] not with their purely figurative usage, but with their role in the discovery and description of 'the truth'" (...) (1969a, 503). Burke's placement of "the truth" in quotation marks reflects his rejection of any simplistically objectivist notion of truth. He is not interested in how these rhetorical figures ornament truth, as if truth existed prior to the entrance of rhetoric. Rather, the relationship between these four master tropes and truth is more complicated. Truth is, for Burke, a rhetorical product as much as a rhetorical precursor. Hence, the tropes function not only epistemologically in the discovery of truth, but also ontologically in the very constitution of truth. 1 Burke's subsequent discussion of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony illustrates how each trope functions dramatistically to make, and to make known, the world.When Burke discusses the trope of irony, the relationship between rhetoric and truth is further complicated. Irony is dialogical. 2 Whereas metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche offer particular perspectives for viewing and knowing the world, irony offers a "perspective of perspectives" (1969a, 512). Ultimately, irony depends upon the perspectives of Others—of other symbol users—and is thus an explicitly dialogical rather than rhetorical trope. Moreover, this inclusion of the voices of Others in the construction of "truth" distinguishes irony as ethical. Irony may, in fact, offer the clearest view of Burke's own incipient theory of ethics. Over against his few explicit discussions of ethics, which reflect either an Aristotelian or Kantian approach to ethics, 3 Burke's development of the master trope of irony as a dialogical vehicle for the construction of intersubjective [End Page 22] truth reveals his maturing approach to ethics and a tacit synthesis of his dramatistic accounts of epistemology, ontology, and ethics.Yet another concept is even more foundational for Burke's incipient theory of ethics within a dramatistic framework. Recalcitrance precedes irony as an account of the presencing of otherness in and through language. Prior to the experience of irony as a clash of perspectives, recalcitrance is the very crashing in of the second perspective. It is the resistance that is met by any particular symbolic framing of the world. Together, recalcitrance and irony form the core of Burke's (underdeveloped) dramatistic theory of ethics and constitute the groundwork for his proposed final installment of his trilogy, which might instead be appropriately "A Dialogue of Motives."Using Emmanuel Levinas's phenomenology of the Other and reconception of ethics as the call to responsibility, 4 this article will demonstrate that Burke's notions of recalcitrance and irony are the groundwork for a full dramatistic description of the phenomenological encounter with the Other and of the nature of the ethical encounter. Moreover, this discussion of recalcitrance and irony will be placed in the context of Burke's two major works, A Grammar of Motives (1969a) and A Rhetoric of Motives (1969b), in an attempt to indicate the implicit trajectory of these works toward the third volume of the trilogy, referred to here as "A Dialogue of Motives." 5 The addition of "A Dialogue of Motives" will rectify Burke's lack of emphasis on ethics and upon the Other, and together, Burke's A Grammar of Motives, A Rhetoric of Motives, and "A Dialogue of Motives"will recast traditional philosophy's main branches of ontology, epistemology, and ethics into dramatistic—i.e., grammatical, rhetorical, and dialogical—terms.In addition, this proposed completion of Burke's trilogy provides a unique conception of dialogue that promises to expand and enrich existing conceptions of dialogue within the field of communication studies. Specifically, a dramatistic notion of dialogue bifurcates traditional notions of two-way, dialogical communication into a "rhetoric" of motives that seeks identification and a "dialogue" of motives that maintains difference. To that end, Burke's notion of dialectic will be discussed in order to... (shrink)

Penelope Maddy advances a purportedly naturalistic account of mathematical methodology which might be taken to answer the question 'What justifies axioms of set theory?' I argue that her account fails both to adequately answer this question and to be naturalistic. Further, the way in which it fails to answer the question deprives it of an analog to one of the chief attractions of naturalism. Naturalism is attractive to naturalists and nonnaturalists alike because it explains the reliability of scientific practice. Maddy's (...) account, on the other hand, appears to be unable to similarly explain the reliability of mathematical practice without violating one of its central tenets. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider an argument for the claim that any satisfactory epistemology of mathematics will violate core tenets of naturalism, i.e. that mathematics cannot be naturalized. I find little reason for optimism that the argument can be effectively answered.

Kenneth Burke: A Dialogue of Motives employs the philosophy of ethics of Emmanuel Levinas to develop a uniquely dramatistic philosophy of ethics. Jeffrey Murray analyzes Kenneth Burke's A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric of Motives and offers the notion of "a dialogue of motives" as a completion of Burke's proposed trilogy and as a supplement to Burke's own tools for rhetorical criticism.

This book examines the implication of Emmanuel Levinas' philosophy of ethics for the theory, criticism, and practice of human communication.

Philip Kitcher's account of scientific progress incorporates a conception of explanatory unification that invites the so-called 'obsessive unifier' worry, to wit, that in our drive to unify the phenomena we might impose artificial structure on the world and consequently produce an incorrect view of how things, in fact, are. I argue that Kitcher's attempt to address this worry is unsatisfactory because it relies on an ability to choose between rival patterns of explanation which itself rests on the relevant choice having (...) already been made. I also suggest a way of answering the worry that Kitcher is not likely to endorse. (shrink)

Chinese export painters learned and adapted the medium of photography by grafting the new technology onto traditional artistic conventions - employing both brush and shutter. The essays in this volume shed light on the birth of a medium.

_Confronting American Labor_ traces the development of the American left, from the Depression era through the Cold War, by examining four representative intellectuals who grappled with the difficult question of labor’s role in society. Since the time of Marx, leftists have raised over and over the question of how an intelligentsia might participate in a movement carried out by the working class. Their modus operandi was to champion those who suffered injustice at the hands of the powerful. From the late (...) nineteenth through much of the twentieth century, this meant a focus on the industrial worker. The Great Depression was a time of remarkable consensus among leftist intellectuals, who often interpreted worker militancy as the harbinger of impending radical change. While most Americans waited out the crisis, listening to the assurances of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Marxian left was convinced that the crisis was systemic. Intellectuals who came of age during the Depression developed the view that the labor movement in America was to be the organizing base for a proletariat. Moreover, many came from working-class backgrounds that contributed to their support of labor. World War II and the resultant economic recovery shattered this coherence on the left. How did radicals opposed to capitalism deal with a labor movement that was very successful in terms of membership and power but clearly capitalist in its orientation? Coker describes the marked ambivalence and confusion of the intellectual left in the postwar years—a period of frustration brought on by a misreading of labor militancy during the 1930s and an unsuccessful search for a radical proletarian movement. The result was a politically and intellectually weakened left for decades to come. C_onfronting American Labor_ examines four individuals who represent a cross section of postwar radicalism. Each came of age on the socialist left, expecting that an anticapitalist movement would emerge from the ranks of labor. Seymour Martin Lipset and C. Wright Mills were professional sociologists. Sidney Lens spent his early life working within the labor movement before becoming a political commentator for a variety of leftist magazines and journals in the postwar era. Historian Herbert Gutman helped to create a “new labor history” that reflected broader transformations within the intellectual left. In tracing their various approaches to the problem of labor, C_onfronting American Labor_ explores the diverse nature of the postwar left. This important work will be of value to anyone interested in labor, class, and American thought. (shrink)

This paper argues that Philip Kitcher's epistemology of mathematics, codified in his Naturalistic Constructivism, is not naturalistic on Kitcher's own conception of naturalism. Kitcher's conception of naturalism is committed to (i) explaining the correctness of belief-regulating norms and (ii) a realist notion of truth. Naturalistic Constructivism is unable to simultaneously meet both of these commitments.

In this article, we describe four theoretical and methodological problems that have impeded implicit attitude research and the popular understanding of its findings. The problems all revolve around assumptions made about the relationships among measures, constructs, cognitive processes, and features of processing. These assumptions have confused our understandings of exactly what we are measuring, the processes that produce implicit evaluations, the meaning of differences in implicit evaluations across people and contexts, the meaning of changes in implicit evaluations in response to (...) intervention, and how implicit evaluations predict behavior. We describe formal modeling as one means to address these problems, and provide illustrative examples. Clarifying these issues has important implications for our understanding of who has particular implicit evaluations and why, when those evaluations are likely to be particularly problematic, how we might best try to change them, and what interventions are best suited to minimize the effects of implicit evaluations on behavior. (shrink)