Cet article met en évidence la manière dont H. Cohen, F. Rosenzweig et E. Levinas inaugurent, dans un même geste spéculatif, une forme nouvelle de « philosophie de la religion », où la religion ne constitue plus seulement un objet, mais un moteur de la rationalité philosophique. Chez chacun d’eux, ce geste passe par l’opposition du paganisme et du judaïsme, qui se prolonge dans l’opposition entre une tradition philosophique enfermée dans l’immanence, et une forme de rationalité philosophique nouvelle, qui s’ouvre (...) à la transcendance.This article emphases the way H. Cohen, F. Rosenzweig et E. Levinas inaugurate, in a same speculative deed, a new form of « philosophy of religion », where religion doesn’t constitute anymore only an object, but a mainspring of the philosophical rationality. In each one of them, this deed goes through the opposition of paganism and Judaism that carries on in the opposition between a philosophical tradition locked in the immanence, and a form of new philosophical rationality, which opens to the transcendence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Transcendence and Violence: The Encounter of Buddhist, Christian, and Primal TraditionsSarah K. PinnockTranscendence and Violence: The Encounter of Buddhist, Christian, and Primal Traditions. By John D'Arcy May. New York: Continuum, 2003. 225 + xi pp.In popular media, religion appears as a dangerous social phenomenon with explosive potential. The investigation of transcendence as a source of violence is particularly timely in light of America's war on terrorism (...) targeting extremist Islam. However, this negative dimension of religion is nothing new. Over the course of history, hostility [End Page 231] and killing are intimately connected with religious divisions. The irony of religious violence as a betrayal of religious ethical ideals is both obvious and inescapable.Approaching this hot topic from the perspective of religious imperialism, John D'Arcy May examines violence perpetrated by the Christian and Buddhist traditions against indigenous religions. His investigation covers damaging evidence against these two universalizing traditions using geographically specific case studies in Asia and the Pacific Rim. Situating Christianity and Buddhism in parallel as religions of transcendence, he compares how indigenous localized religions were overpowered by expansionist universalizing religions, although not eradicated. Into his historical narrative, he weaves his personal encounters with otherness growing up in Australia while virtually oblivious to the oppression of Aboriginals by white settlers, and as a Roman Catholic doing ecumenical work in Papua New Guinea for four years.May opens the book with bold admission of the failures of European Christianity, evidenced in anti-Judaism and Holocaust genocide, and Theravada Buddhism's violent involvement in Sri Lanka's civil conflict between Singhalese nationalists and Hindu Tamils. The reader is led to expect elaboration on the moral failings of Christianity, and this proves true; however, May's examination of the Buddhism's expansion and endorsement of violence tempers the tendency to single out Christianity as uniquely imperialist. He suggests that transcendence itself can cause hierarchy and oppression.Part I of the book focuses on Christianity and violence. Chapter 1 studies how European Protestant and Catholic settlers to Australia treated the Aboriginal peoples. The story is grim. Using a psychoanalytic framework, May interprets the European vilification of Aboriginals as stemming from the repression of the primal other, and the repression of bio-cosmic religion in favor of transcendence. Constructively, he proposes that Aboriginal peoples can offer theological insights about the ontology of sacred space. Christians should not only seek reconciliation in society, but also consider new perspectives on the sacred in nature drawn from the dreaming of Aboriginal religious lore.In chapter 2, May deals with colonization in the Melanesian Islands of the Pacific Ocean, concentrating on Papua New Guinea. In the indigenous religions of Melanesia, the prosperous community is the measure of religious rectitude, while misfortune is explained by the breaking of taboos and the revenge of enemies or evil spirits. After European colonization, "cargo cults" arose among the islands that promised abundant material goods possessed by European settlers by means of religious rituals and magic. Surprisingly, May points out the positive impulses at the root of these cargo cults that are typically viewed as detrimental and even outlawed outright by local governments for their harmful social impact. At bottom, he argues, cargo cults reflect a positive religious aspiration for wholeness and healing in this life that is a counterpoint to the spiritualization of salvation by European Christianity.May tries to avoid idealizing these primal cultures and their religious insights; nevertheless, he finds them instructive for Christian theology. Native religions in both Australia and Papua New Guinea offer models of immanence that emphasize the religious value of nature and just relationships. It should be mentioned that [End Page 232] there is some nuance to this conclusion. For instance, Melanesian religion is portrayed as less exemplary than Australian aboriginal religion. But May's main point is that violence on a global scale is validated by Christian notions of transcendence that deny the material aspirations of the indigenous community, and promote a superiority that wreaks violence among indigenous peoples. Hopefully, intercultural theology will allow Christians to appreciate the Aboriginal respect for sacred geography and the Melanesian quest for the flourishing of one's local community.Christianity and Buddhism are treated... (shrink)

This is an engaging book on a subject which most people in our culture assume went out of fashion long ago. The book had its genesis in one of a series of symposia convened by the Church Society for College Work of Cambridge to explore certain themes and ideas which have great import for our time. The various authors of the essays eschew the habit of viewing Transcendence as the traditional content of metaphysical arguments or revelatory statements about the (...) nature of God outside or independent of the world and seek for signs of the possibility of achieving a renewed sense of Transcendence in the domains of inner experience, history, culture, language, science, technology, and the arts. Huston Smith suggests two options of human fulfillment: psychological and ontological, both providing a kind of transcendence of self and society. He refuses to accept one and reject the other but instead to convince us that both are legitimate. M. Murphy claims that the experience of psychological and social transcendence can be fostered by educational projects such as encounter groups, gestalt therapy workshops and sensitivity training programs. In his "Manifesto for a Dionysian Theology," Sam Keen analyzes the Apollonian way of reasoning and planning which has come to dominate in Western culture and makes a plea for a reassertion of the Dionysian principle in religion which might be expressive of life as dance, centrality of feelings and sensations, a pantheistic conception of God and a theology of play. Harvey Cox asserts that our society has lost its capacity for utopian fantasy resulting in the inability to conceive of any world which is not a mere modification or extension of our own world. He suggests that we consciously become "fools for Christ" again and give full rein to our powers of creative fantasizing even at the risk of contracting "religious madness." Donald Schon urges post-modern man to give up hope for achieving a stable political order and to develop an "ethic for change" appropriate to the demands of our society where change is all-pervasive. Essays by R. Bellah and H. Richardson explore myths of transcendence as ordering structures in society and plead for increased attention to correspondences among the disciplines of theology, sociology, and psychology. E. Fackenheim and W. Kaufman seek to clarify the notion of transcendence in Judaism and Christianity respectively and to "clear the way for a positive revelation." In keeping with the shared notion that transcendent reality is present and active within the human process, two eminent process philosophers, Wieman and Hartshorne discuss the "implications for a concept of transcendence that follows from affirming the creative freedom of man." The essays singly and together reject the notion that the existence and nature of transcendent reality can be arrived at by pursuing a single line of argumentation to its bitter end and instead they work together from various points of view to reinforce our sense of man's renewed thirst for the Divine and the subsequent rediscovery of God's uninterrupted presence within the world of "Immanent Possibility."--J. B. L. (shrink)

This essay takes on the implicit claim in Taylor's A Secular Age, forecast in some of his earlier writings, that the desire for a meaningful life can never be satisfied in this life. As a result, A Secular Age is suffused with a tragic view of existence; its love of narratives of religious longing makes no sense otherwise. Yet there are other models of religion that lend meaning to existence, and in the majority of this essay, I take up one (...) model that Taylor ignores in A Secular Age, namely that of a God who is immanent in social life throughout religious law. Turning to Maimonides's account of divine law in the Guide of the Perplexed, I argue that a vision of the divine law that is divine because of its effects in society, namely the promotion of human welfare, can mend the relations between varying kinds of believers and unbelievers in a way that Taylor thinks is impossible. A God who commands laws is a God who inaugurates an “anthropocentric shift” long before current understandings of secularization see it beginning. (shrink)

This paper considers three essential gestures in Levinas’s theology, highlighting in each case how Levinas’s thinking allows him to either incorporate or sidestep some of the fiercest modern criticisms of traditional theism. First, we present Levinas’s vision of divine transcendence, outlining his ontological atheism and explaining how this obviates proving the existence of God and avoids the tangles of traditional theodicy. Second, we describe Levinas’s idea of the trace, showing how a nonexistent God still leaves its mark in the (...) face of the other person and explaining how this vision of divine immanence accords with the agendas of thinkers such as Feuerbach and Nietzsche, who criticized theology that elevated God while debasing humanity. Third, we present Levinas’s insistence on the philosophical primacy of ethics, showing how he infuses his ethical philosophy with religious themes, elevating moral philosophy to the level of ultimate concern in a way that even atheist social theoris. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Love of Country and Love of God: The Political Uses of Religion in MachiavelliBenedetto Fontana*This paper will discuss the place of religion in Machiavelli’s thought. 1 The traditional and generally accepted interpretation presents Machiavelli’s religion as a belief system whose value is determined by its functional utility to the state. In this he is said to resemble Cicero, 2 Montesquieu, 3 and Tocqueville, 4 among others. This view is (...) based on the proposition—one that is now fundamental to a modern understanding of Machiavelli—that his political theory develops a politics without moral, theological, and religious foundations (what Benedetto Croce 5 calls the “autonomy of politics” and Sheldon Wolin 6 the “autonomy of political theory”). Students of Machiavelli who ascribe to him an instrumentalist theory of religion rest their interpretation on this conception of politics: a distinction is established between religion viewed as religio, and religion conceived as fides, where the former is used to develop and cement social bonds and the latter is a faith based on a transcendent “truth.”A reading of the texts shows that Machiavelli discusses various kinds of religion. He refers, for example, to multiple forms of Christianity, such as “primitive” [End Page 639] or original Christianity, 7 official, medieval Christianity, the ecclesiastical principality of the papacy, as well as to ancient Judaism, 8 paganism, and to Islam. 9 However, it is possible to discern in Machiavelli two principal or distinctive types. One is based on the opposition Machiavelli sees between the religion of the Romans (which instills virtù) and the religion of the post-classical and post-Roman Christian world (which teaches humility and passivity). The other is prophetic religion, in which Machiavelli contrasts the prophet armed to the prophet unarmed. Thus, we have prophetic religion and non-prophetic religion; the former is either armed or unarmed, and the latter is either immanent (natural) or transcendent. 10Machiavelli’s stress on the importance of virtù (whether of the prince or of the people) suggests that religion is not simply religio—that is, a political technique to rule and to control the masses. Rather, it presupposes a concern for a moral fides which, though certainly not transcendent, is nevertheless necessary to the construction of a political order based on virtù. His concern with civil and military virtue links the armed prophetic religion with that of the ancient Romans, such that ancient Judaism, Islam, and a reformed Christianity (a kind of Lutheranism ante litteram) all stand opposed to primitive and post-classical Christianity.Machiavelli anticipates in theory the national, anti-papal, and anti-imperial movements that were later realized in history by the Lutheran and Calvinist Reformations. He attempts to infuse the corrupt and decadent Christian conception of the world with a new, innovating spirit, one opposed to the prevailing medieval and scholastic conception of the world. In the past Christian philosophers and thinkers revised the classical notions of virtus and arete, transforming them into Christian concepts of value. Machiavelli attempts a similar “transvaluation of values” (Nietzsche), but for different ends and in a different direction: he reinterprets the Christian religion in order to assimilate it into his conception of virtù and his vision of a vivere civile.In the first part of this paper the relation Machiavelli establishes between “speaking with God” and the founding and/or reforming of states is explored. Parallels between Christian and pre-Christian (pagan and biblical) rulers reveal a basic ambiguity in Machiavelli’s belief that religion—that is, the claim of having spoken with God—is necessary to effective rule. In the second part [End Page 640] Machiavelli’s teaching (“new ways and methods”) is compared to Christ’s message of the “good news.” The contrast between the two is presented in terms of an opposition between different “ways of living,” each with its specific moral claims and political consequences. The opposition is not, the section argues, between logos and kratos, ethos and kratos, but rather between diverse ways of understanding logos and ethos. The final section argues that Machiavelli uses biblical, pagan, and Christian forms of religious symbols and metaphors in order to reevaluate the concepts of patria and amore. In so doing... (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to clash the problem of forgiveness as formulated in contemporary secular and Christian ethics with Kierkegaard’s considerations concerning this issue. Kierkegaard’s thought is increasingly used in the modern debate on forgiveness. It is therefore worth investigating whether Kierkegaard’s considerations are really able to overcome in any way contemporary disputes concerning this problem or enrich our thinking in this area. The main thesis of this paper states that there is a fundamental, ontological difference between Kierkegaard’s understanding (...) of forgiveness and that of modern thinkers. While the Danish philosopher refers to the transcendent reality of spirit, where the act of forgiveness is always performed by God, in contemporary ethical and Christian thought, forgiveness is first and foremost formulated from an immanent point of view that appeals to the world of human values. This difference is demonstrated by analyzing the four main themes corresponding to the most important issues taken up in the contemporary debate on forgiveness. These are: the victim-offender relation, the conditionality and unconditionality of forgiveness, the issue of condonation, and the problem of the unforgivable. As a result of the analyses presented herein, the impossibility of directly applying Kierkegaard’s transcendent theses to ethical thought of the immanent variety will be shown. (shrink)

This paper will attempt to assess the primary differences between what I take to be the two primary philosophical "traditions" in contemporary French philosophy, using Derrida (transcendence) and Deleuze (immanence) as exemplary representatives. The body of the paper will examine the use of these terms in three different areas of philosophy on which Derrida and Deleuze have both written: subjectivity, ontology, and epistemology. (1) In the field of subjectivity, the notion of the subject has been critiqued in two manners, (...) either by appealing either to the transcendence of the other (Levinas, Derrida) or to the immanent jlux of experience itself, in relation to which the Ego itself is trancendent (Deleuze, Foucault, Sartre, James). (2) In the field of ontology, a purely "immanent" ontology would be an ontology in which there is neither a "beyond" or an "otherwise" Being, nor "interruptions" in Being, both of which would require an appeal to a formal element of transcendence (Deleuze). Such a "transcendent" and aporetic structure, which can never appear or be present as such within Being, is what lies at the basis of the project of deconstruction, with its attendant aporias (Derrida). (3) This distinction, finally, finds parallels in Kant's epistemology, for whom the possible experience is conditioned by purely immanent criteria (Deleuze), whereas what goes beyond the limits of possible experience is transcendent (Derrida). Drawing on these three thread of analysis, the paper concludes with an assessment of what is at stake in the ethical differences between the two traditions. The question of "transcendence" is "What mast I do?", which is the question of morality (a duty or obligation that is beyond being, an "ought" beyond the "is"). The question of "immanence" is "What can I do?" (my power or capacity as an existing individual within being). For Levinas and Derrida, ethics precedes ontology because it is derived from an element of transcendence (the Other); for Deleuze, ethics is ontology because it is derived from the immanent relation of beings to Being at the level of their existence (Spinoza). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Does Judaism Condone Violence? Holiness and Ethics in the Jewish Tradition by Alan L. MittlemanMatthew LeveringDoes Judaism Condone Violence? Holiness and Ethics in the Jewish Tradition by Alan L. Mittleman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), v + 227 pp.Alan Mittleman has written a profoundly thought-provoking book. A main question of the book is whether a higher (revealed) law may in some cases require harm to be done (...) to the neighbor—harm that otherwise would be unjust. Mittleman offers some fascinating examples of cases in which Jews have appealed to God's Law in order to justify oppression of Gentiles. He cites a contemporary halakhic text, Torat ha-Melekh (The King's Torah), as particularly egregious. While Torat ha-Melekh was widely condemned by rabbis and the general public in Israel, it had an audience among the ultra-Orthodox. According to the Torat ha-Melekh, Gentiles' souls are not intrinsically holy in the way that Jews' souls are. This means that killing Gentile children in wartime may be acceptable due to the threat that otherwise these children may grow up to kill Jews. The Torat ha-Melekh observes that many Gentiles do not practice and obey the seven Noachide commandments. Since this is so, the Gentiles who do not obey the Noachide commandments live "in an inhuman state, where the brutish nature of their souls has free rein and their lives have lost value" (186).Another example given by Mittleman is the status of the Holy Land and the Holy People. Insofar as the holiness of the land and people is thought to be intrinsic—an inseparable property—problems can arise. According to a midrash in Bereshit Rabbah, the land is so intrinsically holy that only the dead who are buried in the land—or whose dead bodies somehow travel to the land—will rise from the dead and enjoy everlasting resurrected life. Likewise, the land's air is presented as uniquely making its inhabitants wise, and the divine presence or shekinah comes only in the land. For the medieval Jewish philosopher Yehuda Halevi, in his Kuzari: The Book of Refutation and Proof on Behalf of the Most Despised Religion (ca. 1140), the land of Israel is the most temperate climate and the most conducive to producing the ideal human beings. In addition, Halevi thinks that only certain descendants of Adam are "true Adamites" (66). A true Adamite is a son of God, just as Adam was. Specifically, only Seth and some of his descendants are fully human in accord with the Adamic model. It is only in the family of Jacob that "God's influence [finally] becomes the property of an entire people" (67). The true Adamites are Adam's (and Jacob's) seed; other humans are comparatively speaking mere husks. Although people can convert to Judaism, therefore, converts cannot be equal to those born of the Jewish nation. This does not mean that all who descend from Jacob are holy, since [End Page 745] it is possible for a Jew to distort his or her purity of soul. Nevertheless, for Halevi the Jewish people are a holy seed that is intrinsically superior to all other humans, so that it is possible to say that "Israel is an angelomorphic, even theomorphic race" (69).Moses Maimonides responded to Halevi, rejecting his viewpoint completely—on the grounds that holiness is not an intrinsic or biological (let alone racial) property. Yet, Halevi's viewpoint influenced Jewish Kabbalah in a major way. For the Kabbalist text the Zohar, the people of Israel derive from the emanations of the divine, whereas all other nations derive from the impure powers. The Zohar holds, "The other nations count for nothing in God's sight. They are the products of Eve's illicit union with the serpent," rather than coming forth from the theomorphic being who was Adam (70). Similarly, Moses de Leon—thought to be an author of the Zohar—argues that Gentiles ontologically possess impure souls that will carry them to spiritual damnation and will ensure that they have no participation in the resurrection of the dead. Another Kabbalist, Joseph of Hamadan, makes the same point that Gentiles... (shrink)

Against the two dominant ethical paradigms of continental philosophy–Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of the other and Michel Foucault’s ethics of self-cultivation—The Self-Emptying Subject theorizes an ethics of self-emptying, or kenosis, one that reveals the immanence of an impersonal and dispossessed life without a why. Rather than align immanence with the enclosures of the subject, Dubilet engages the history of Christian mystical theology, modern philosophy, and contemporary theories of the subject to rethink immanence as what precedes and exceeds the very difference between (...) the (human) self and the (divine) other, between the subject and transcendence. By arguing that transcendence operates on life in secular as well as religious domains, the book challenges a dominant distribution of concepts within contemporary theoretical discourse, which associates transcendence exclusively with religion and theology and immanence exclusively with modern secularity and philosophy. -/- The Self-Emptying Subject argues that it is important to resist framing the relationship between medieval theology and modern philosophy as a transition from the affirmation of divine transcendence to the establishment of autonomous subjects. Through an engagement with Meister Eckhart, G. W. F. Hegel, and Georges Bataille, it uncovers a medieval theological discourse that rejects the primacy of pious subjects and the transcendence of God (Eckhart); retrieves a modern philosophical discourse that critiques the creation of self-standing subjects through a speculative rewriting of the concepts of Christian theology (Hegel); and explores a discursive site that demonstrates the subjecting effects of transcendence across theological and philosophical operations and archives (Bataille). Taken together, these interpretations suggest that if we suspend the antagonistic relationship between theological and philosophical discourses and decenter our periodizing assumptions and practices, we might encounter a yet unmapped theoretical fecundity of self-emptying that frees life from transcendent powers that incessantly subject it to their own ends. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Redeeming the Enlightenment: Christianity and the Liberal VirtuesJudith W. KayRedeeming the Enlightenment: Christianity and the Liberal Virtues Bruce K. Ward Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2010. 230 pp. $26.00.Bruce Ward has written a remarkably rich intellectual history whose theological diagnosis yields refreshing interpretations of ethical norms. Each chapter treats one of liberalism’s cherished virtues (equality, authenticity, tolerance, and compassion) and argues for the Christian roots of each in order (...) to show how Christianity is “the fulfillment of what the Enlightenment, at its best, sought” (196).Ward uses the Christian humanism of Dostoevsky to redeem the equality espoused by Rousseau and Kant in light of Nietzsche’s attacks. Equality is grounded neither in a human capacity nor in obedience to a principle, but in the imago Dei. While hardly original, this foundation with attention to immanence can create an enlivened perception of others in their richness while being transformed by love from “the other world.” Ward redeems authenticity with agapic self-dispossession rather than self-assertion, which liberates it from individualism and opens it to the “call of God.” Liberal compassion finds its fulfillment in the love of particular, suffering humans, which requires discernment, respect, and effective action. Such compassion is rooted in and revelatory of divine love.Ward’s most compelling chapter, on tolerance, begins by noting how this ideal often inhibits moral judgment or promotes indifference. Ward is a student of neither Mill’s nor Nussbaum’s libertarian versions of tolerance. Instead, Ward draws upon René Girard to argue that tolerance must account for the perpetrator’s demonization of social outcasts that leads to the victim’s resentment. Victims must lead the way in exposing and then exiting this cycle. Dostoevsky recommends a practice of taking responsibility for all persecution (“all are guilty for all”) as an expression of active love. Such a practice forges points of human contact between groups in conflict, even if prejudices are slow to change. In response to intolerant religions, Christians should assume such universal responsibility rather than rely on the “restrained” violence of the liberal state. Although Ward derides multicultural versions of tolerance that “celebrate difference,” he observes that the universal human of Enlightenment ontology cannot exist except through the particularity of a lived story—precisely multiculturalism’s insight. [End Page 213]The deep lament motivating this book is that an inadequate Christian theology lost its power to explain the world. The resulting defense of humanism by Enlightenment philosophes was deeply shaped by Christian ideals, but they were unable to articulate a foundation for moral norms, which made Nietzschean nihilists appear sane. Both groups are ill equipped to respond to current religious terrorism. As Charles Taylor explores in The Secular Age, the third contenders are those who affirm a good beyond this world. Ward differs from Taylor by arguing that the problem is not a lack of transcendent grounding for norms but an inadequate conceptualization of immanence and transcendence. Ward uses the Trinitarian approach of Dostoevsky to reorder transcendence and immanence, which avoids translating “Christianity into liberalism” or injecting transcendence into secularism.Ward’s project succeeds if one accepts Nietzsche as the major critic of the Enlightenment. Readers who have accepted as legitimate other criticisms of the philosophes may be disappointed. His discussion of compassion lacks Catholic interlocutors such as Edward Vacek who argue that agape avoids the polarity between self-love and compassion; feminists who critique Enlightenment dichotomies between savage and civilized or reason and emotion; and Marxists who argue that capitalism denies human equality, thus making Ward’s “capitalist liberal humanism” sound naive. It is not clear how Ward would redeem the Enlightenment from such criticisms.Nevertheless, Ward’s rereading of the Enlightenment is majestic in its sweep, compelling in its close textual analysis, and brimming with fresh insights. The text assumes much familiarity with the philosophes; its pedagogical use is recommended for graduate students and scholars. [End Page 214]Judith W. KayUniversity of Puget SoundCopyright © 2012 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On the Way to Ethical CultureThe Meaning of Art as Oscillating between the Other, Il y a, and the ThirdRossitsa Varadinova Borkowski (bio)Who can suppose that a poet capable of effectively introducing into his scenes rhetoricians, generals and various other characters, each displaying some peculiar excellence, was nothing more than a droll or juggler, capable only of cheating or flattering his hearer, and not of instructing him?Are we all (...) agreed that the chief merit of a poet consists in his accurate representation of the affairs of life? Can this be done by a mere driveller, unacquainted with the world?The excellence of a poet is not to be measured by the same standard as that of a mechanic or a blacksmith, where honor and virtue have nothing to do with our estimate. But the poet and the individual are connected, and he only can become a good poet who is in the first instance a worthy man.— Strabo, The Geography of StraboAfter Emmanuel Levinas showed the need for radically positing the Ethical as the original structure of human inwardness and as art is a fundamental aspect of being human, a reexamination of the meaning of the Artistic and its relation with the Ethical is necessary.1 Throughout [End Page 195] the history of Western thought and culture, the meaning of art has been regarded either as imitation of the world and nature (Plato and Aristotle), objective self-expression of the Absolute Spirit (Hegel) or Being (Heidegger), a subjective “free play of imagination” and judgment (Kant and the Romanticists), or as inevitable engagement with social issues and political position (the Marxists and Sartre). In spite of the variety of theories and views about the essence and value of art, it is unquestionable that the Artistic has transformational power over humans, which points to art’s connection with ethics. Therefore, following Levinas, instead of asking the general ontological questions about the gist of art “What is art?” or “Why is there art instead of something else?” we should seek an answer to the ethical question about the meaning of art: “How can the existence of art be justified?”The answers could be sought in two directions. The first already quite well beaten path explores Levinas’s own vision on art, which most critics find hesitant or even ambiguous.2 The impression of this hesitation is significant on the background of Levinas’s rigorous clarity about the Ethical. Overlooking this impression would lead to conclusions that would deviate our attention from the main question about how the existence of art can be justified. A possible explanation would be that Levinas’s seemingly fragmentary thoughts about art are woven into the fabric of his ultimate meta-ethical project — that is, his approach to art is instrumental, subjected to the Ethical. For example, commentators agree that Levinas’s early article “Reality and Its Shadow” (1948) is the only one exclusively focused on art and use it as a starting point to assemble the fragments of his aesthetic views into an aesthetic theory. Although this move might be justified methodologically, Levinas is clear that the discussion of art in this article is subordinated to the more general (and more serious) question about the nontruth of being (LR 132). Positing art as mythological and mystical, thus incapable of transmitting a meaningful message if separated from philosophical criticism (142), Levinas puts “in brackets” the discussion about the artistic and focuses on the reason qua knowledge (philosophy) and its relation with the Other. The impression of his hesitation about art’s [End Page 196] independent capability to dephase the instant, to breach the ontological gravity, and to expose the human spirit to the Ethical comes from those texts where Levinas applies his own vision about the integrative role of philosophical criticism — i.e., texts that work as philosophical criticism of art: “Transcendence through poetry — is this serious?”3 (PN 175n12), “if poetry can contain teachings” (165; emphasis added). Therefore, on one hand, Levinas exhaustively scrutinizes all possibilities of ethics of philosophy and comes to the clear position that in order for reason to function humanly it should be dethroned by the Other. He is... (shrink)

ABSTRACT In his published work, Levinas only mentions metaphor for the sake of dismissing its relevance to his ethics of transcendence. Metaphor is aligned with the poetic imagery and the rhetorical devices that weave together an ontology of immanence, whereas transcendence is said to occur through an immediate encounter with the other. But Levinas's unpublished lecture “La Métaphore” is of interest precisely because it troubles this distinction through the notion of a “metaphorical transcendence.” Although Levinas abandons this (...) terminology after his lecture, this article suggests that an implicit, but unavowed, operation of metaphor persists in the guise of his ethics of substitution. (shrink)

Habermas emphasizes the importance for critical thinking of ideas of truth and moral validity that are at once context-transcending and immanent to human practices. in a recent review, Peter Dews queries his distinction between metaphysically construed transcendence and transcendence from within, asking provocatively in what sense Habermas does not believe in God. I answer that his conception of “God” is resolutely postmetaphysical, a god that is constructed by way of human linguistic practices. I then give three reasons for (...) why it should not be embraced by contemporary critical social theory. First, in the domain of practical reason, this conception of transcendence excludes by fiat any “Other” to communicative reason, blocking possibilities for mutual learning. Second, due to the same exclusion, it risks reproducing an undesirable social order. Third, it is inadequate for the purposes of a critical theory of social institutions. (shrink)

This article situates Levinas’s reading of Kant in terms of his opposition to Heidegger. It suggests that, although Levinas and Heidegger both put great stress upon the affective aspect of Kant’s philosophy, ultimately they diverge sharply over the issue of finitude: where Heidegger’s Kant suggests that there is “nothing but finite Dasein,” Levinas stresses the significance of transcending finitude, ethically. In this respect, Levinas’s Kant-reading converges strongly with the interpretation Heidegger so strongly opposed—Cassirer’s. And, as such, Levinas’s anti-Heideggerian position commits (...) him—perhaps surprisingly—to a kind of neo-Kantian Manichaeism: on the one hand, finite and sense-less Being; on the other, an ethical intrigue beyond ontology. The article concludes that Levinas thereby maintains (rather than “deconstructs”) central schisms of High Modernity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Spinoza's Religion: A New Reading of the Ethics by Claire CarlisleSanja SärmanCARLISLE, Claire. Spinoza's Religion: A New Reading of the Ethics. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2021. 288 pp. Cloth, $29.95; paper, $22.95Spinoza has variously been read as presenting a fully naturalized theology (Steven Nadler), as a secretive Marrano philosopher of immanence cleverly hiding his true allegiances in plain sight (Yirmiyahu Yovel, see also Leo Strauss) and as (...) a God-intoxicated man (Novalis). Rarely have the assessments of a man's religion been so varied and conflicted. In an exemplarily searching spirit, Claire Carlisle explores the issue while keeping the question of what religion is an open one. The book comprises nine chapters—essayistic in form but scholarly in content—devoted to examining the issue from different angles.The leitmotif of Spinoza's religiosity is, for Carlisle, being-in-God, a term of art that denotes at once a metaphysical reality and a spiritual project. We are inevitably in God: This is an ontological as well as a conceptual dependence-relation. Being-in-God is participatory dependence on God's own being. In illuminating the relation between God and non-God, Carlisle draws on the rich Catholic tradition. For example, being in-God means being in another (God) without ever being the other of God, to whom all being belongs. This asymmetrical take on the otherness-relation clearly echoes Nicholaus of Cusa's thoughts about God as non-aliud, and Carlisle cites him, not as an ancestor of Spinozism but as a cotraveler along a certain pathway for understanding God.Although being-in-God is an indisputable reality, it is also a spiritual challenge. Since we are by necessity in-God, the spiritual task will paradoxically consist in becoming what we already are, and thereby gaining freedom-in-necessity.In my view, Carlisle's reading reaps rich fruit from its assumption that ontology and normativity are not, indeed cannot be, sequestrated within Spinoza's thought. Moreover, its study of the affectivity—the qualia, even—of being-in-God presents us with a welcome counterweight to descriptions of Spinoza's system from without. Differently put, for Carlisle, the question "What is it like?" can sensibly be asked about being-in-God. Inspired by Spinoza's earliest work, Carlisle sketches a philosophical diagnosis of the devout person who is compelled ("necessitated") by the work she has to do and therefore enjoys an enviable singularity of purpose: Following Latour and Foucault, Carlisle sees a distinctively spiritual quality in certain modes of attention. Attending to oneself and others as they are in-God instills calm; in other words, on Carlisle's reading, the affective aspect of being-in-God is characterized by being at rest with oneself and others (quies is Latin for "rest"). Her careful reading of the Latin text exposes a network of acquiescentia (and cognate terms) in Spinoza's work, somewhat obfuscated through Curley's English translation, which variously renders the word as "esteem" and "satisfaction": What the text gains in stylistic points, it may lose in spiritual significance. In the Ethics, acquiescentia in se ipso is a kind of self-esteem or self-confidence that becomes religiously poignant when mediated through the insight that one is in God: [End Page 347] Through the realization of being in-God, one's calm yet affective appreciation of oneself becomes indistinguishable both from one's love of God and from God's love of oneself. This is an interesting phenomenal perspective on Spinoza's doctrine of the third kind of knowledge.At times, one could perhaps wish for a more systematic discussion of core concepts, such as that of infinity. For example, Carlisle cites Spinoza's idea that we cannot bridge the infinite distance which separates us from God but does not explicitly discuss how this infinite distance is to be reconciled with ontological intimacy; while we sense the proper response, it is not demonstrated.In the end, Carlisle's work successfully shows that we cannot understand Spinoza's religiosity if we model it after our late-modern concept of religion—a construct that, as the historian Peter Harrison has argued, was... (shrink)

"What matters is not so much that Žižek is endorsing a demythologized, disenchanted Christianity without transcendence, as that he is offering in the end a heterodox version of Christian belief."--John Milbank"To put it even more bluntly, my claim is that it is Milbank who is effectively guilty of heterodoxy, ultimately of a regression to paganism: in my atheism, I am more Christian than Milbank."--Slavoj ŽižekIn this corner, philosopher Slavoj Žižek, a militant atheist who represents the critical-materialist stance against religion's (...) illusions; in the other corner, "Radical Orthodox" theologian John Milbank, an influential and provocative thinker who argues that theology is the only foundation upon which knowledge, politics, and ethics can stand. In The Monstrosity of Christ, Žižek and Milbank go head to head for three rounds, employing an impressive arsenal of moves to advance their positions and press their respective advantages. By the closing bell, they have not only proven themselves worthy adversaries, they have shown that faith and reason are not simply and intractably opposed. Žižek has long been interested in the emancipatory potential offered by Christian theology. And Milbank, seeing global capitalism as the new century's greatest ethical challenge, has pushed his own ontology in more political and materialist directions. Their debate in The Monstrosity of Christ concerns the future of religion, secularity, and political hope in light of a monsterful event--God becoming human. For the first time since Žižek's turn toward theology, we have a true debate between an atheist and a theologian about the very meaning of theology, Christ, the Church, the Holy Ghost, Universality, and the foundations of logic. The result goes far beyond the popularized atheist/theist point/counterpoint of recent books by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and others. Žižek begins, and Milbank answers, countering dialectics with "paradox." The debate centers on the nature of and relation between paradox and parallax, between analogy and dialectics, between transcendent glory and liberation. Slavoj Žižek is a philosopher and cultural critic. He has published over thirty books, including Looking Awry, The Puppet and the Dwarf, and The Parallax View. John Milbank is an influential Christian theologian and the author of Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason and other books. Creston Davis, who conceived of this encounter, studied under both Žižek and Milbank. (shrink)

"What matters is not so much that Žižek is endorsing a demythologized, disenchanted Christianity without transcendence, as that he is offering in the end a heterodox version of Christian belief."--John Milbank"To put it even more bluntly, my claim is that it is Milbank who is effectively guilty of heterodoxy, ultimately of a regression to paganism: in my atheism, I am more Christian than Milbank."--Slavoj ŽižekIn this corner, philosopher Slavoj Žižek, a militant atheist who represents the critical-materialist stance against religion's (...) illusions; in the other corner, "Radical Orthodox" theologian John Milbank, an influential and provocative thinker who argues that theology is the only foundation upon which knowledge, politics, and ethics can stand. In The Monstrosity of Christ, Žižek and Milbank go head to head for three rounds, employing an impressive arsenal of moves to advance their positions and press their respective advantages. By the closing bell, they have not only proven themselves worthy adversaries, they have shown that faith and reason are not simply and intractably opposed. Žižek has long been interested in the emancipatory potential offered by Christian theology. And Milbank, seeing global capitalism as the new century's greatest ethical challenge, has pushed his own ontology in more political and materialist directions. Their debate in The Monstrosity of Christ concerns the future of religion, secularity, and political hope in light of a monsterful event--God becoming human. For the first time since Žižek's turn toward theology, we have a true debate between an atheist and a theologian about the very meaning of theology, Christ, the Church, the Holy Ghost, Universality, and the foundations of logic. The result goes far beyond the popularized atheist/theist point/counterpoint of recent books by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and others. Žižek begins, and Milbank answers, countering dialectics with "paradox." The debate centers on the nature of and relation between paradox and parallax, between analogy and dialectics, between transcendent glory and liberation. Slavoj Žižek is a philosopher and cultural critic. He has published over thirty books, including Looking Awry, The Puppet and the Dwarf, and The Parallax View. John Milbank is an influential Christian theologian and the author of Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason and other books. Creston Davis, who conceived of this encounter, studied under both Žižek and Milbank. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: 1. An Ethical Transcendental Philosophy 1 -- 2. Beyond Being. Ontology and Eschatology in the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas 33 -- 3. The Rationality of the Philosophy of Levinas 56 -- 4. Levinas on Substitution 83 -- 5. Judaism and Hellenism in the Philosophy of Levinas and Heidegger 101 -- 6. Ontological Difference (Heidegger) and Ontological Separation (Levinas) 115 -- 7. Enmity, Friendship, Corporeality 133 -- 8. The Rationality of Transcendence 147 -- 9. Levinas on (...) Theology and the Philosophy of Religion 169. (shrink)

Translated by Drew S. Burk and Anthony Paul Smith. Excerpted from Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy , (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2012). THE END TIMES OF PHILOSOPHY The phrase “end times of philosophy” is not a new version of the “end of philosophy” or the “end of history,” themes which have become quite vulgar and nourish all hopes of revenge and powerlessness. Moreover, philosophy itself does not stop proclaiming its own death, admitting itself to be half dead (...) and doing nothing but providing ammunition for its adversaries. With our sights set on clearing up this nuance, we differentiate philosophy as an institutional entity, and the philosophizability of the World and History, of “thought-world,” which universalizes the narrow concept of philosophy and that of “capital.” We also give an eschatological and apocalyptical cause to this end, of “times” or “ages” rather than those of philosophical practice. Last but not least, it is the Future itself in the performativity of its ultimatum that determines this end times, reversing these times from the Identity the Future accorded to it, withdrawing the thought-world from the lie of its death. Why this style of axioms and oracles, these more or less subtle distinctions, old and debased, with an appeal to the ultimata , to end times and last words? We fight to give, parallel to the concept of Hell, its new theoretical position, for its philosophical return and its non-philosophical transformation. No more so than any other word, Hell is not a metaphor here, just the Principle of Sufficient World. Every man, no doubt, has his “hell” readily available, connivance, control, conformism, domestication, schooling, alienation, extermination, exploitation, oppression, anxiety, etc. We have our little list that the Contemporaries established in the previous century in the same way one used to construct lists of virtues and vices or honors and wealth. They invented it for us without knowing it, for us-the-Futures who have as our responsibility to invent its use. In the Christian and Gnostic tradition, the struggle of the End Times takes place “on earth.” The most sophisticated of believers have it taking place in Heaven as well, above all in Heaven. The various kinds of gnosis imagine infinite falls and vertiginous highs, the vertigo of salvation. On Earth as in Heaven, a hell is available. The Marxists have the law of profit and the control of production, the class struggle Capital imposes on man. The Nietzscheans, the dull grumble of the struggle in the foundations of World and History, the domestication of man, the society of control. The phenomenologists, the capture of being, the most superficial amongst them, the age of suspicion. But all of these “hells” are taken from World, History, Society, and Religion. What we call Hell is no longer of the order of these specific and total intra-worldly generalities, it is both more singular and more universal, no longer being at all of the same order, it is the determinant Identity of these small hells strung out through history but unified here in the name of the last Humaneity. It is even found within the French idiom for hell [ enfer ], en-fer literally means “in-irons.” We are as much “in-irons” as we are “alive” [ en-Vie ]. We believe in Hell but as non-philosophers and it is even because we are non-philosophers that we can believe in it outside of any sort of religion. Hell is less mythological than ideological, it combines philosophizability with universal capital. Under what form? A single term could work for them without being a metaphor or something they would participate in by analogy, a more innovative and conjectural term than control, more universal than profit. It would denote the growing and permanent extortion of a surplus-value of communication, of speed and of urgency in change, in productivity and in work, in the pressure of images and slogans. It would be worse than solicitation, more tenacious than capture, more active and persecutory than control, softer and more insidious than a frontal attack, just as perverse as questioning and accusation, less brutal and offensive than extermination, less ritualized than inquisition, it would be soft and dispersed, instantaneous and vicious, it would be a crime without declared violence. Collusion and conformism, it would be afraid to show itself. Related to rumor, from which it borrows its infinite and tortuous ways. It is harassment. As a modernized form of Hell, perhaps harassment has a long future in front of it, of innocent torture, slow assassination, in short the fall, but radical with no way of recovering and which tolerates only salvation. THE PHILOSOPHICAL PAST OF NON-PHILOSOPHY Non-philosophy is thus Man as the utopian identity of the philosophical form of the World, a utopia destined to transform it. We still have to understand these equations, in particular that of the being-uni-versed from Man, and this book adheres to this by re-exposing non-philosophy in a different way via one of its new possibilities. It uses this opportunity to once again take up formulations that lead to objections answering certain external critics, as well as revisiting diverging interpretations specific to non-philosophers. A portion of this book is devoted to going through these theories via a strict or “lengthy” presentation of non-philosophy, and its defense against more expeditious solutions. This work of rectification is the occasion, merely the occasion, for refocusing non-philosophy on Man (the “Man-in-person,” “Humaneity”), and in a more innovative manner, on its utopian vocation established since the book Future Christ . As for this “occasion,” it is quite obvious. A school of posture, not to say a school of thought, supposes a minimum of closure from the most liberating of knowledge, a heritage, its utilization, and its no less certain dispersal. Within its development, a variety of interpretations will no doubt appear, deviations that are as much normalizations, and a struggle against this multiplication of divergent tendencies. These are perhaps not inevitable evils, especially here, merely a normal development according to the twisting paths of history. But the problem is made worse by the fact that this school of non-philosophers is that of utopia. Not the former attempts devoted to commenting on the worst authoritarian and criminal forms of the past and the present, but utopia as the determinant principle for human life, or to put it another way, of the Future as an irreducible presupposition of (for) thinking the World and History. Non-philosophers are engaged in an aleatory navigation between the respect for the most rigorous utopia, whose rules are not that of the reproductive imagination but those from the Future determining imagination itself, as well as the temptations, diversions, and remorse of history. Little by little, we will begin to understand that the Future as we understand it no longer has any temporal consistency or positive content, without being an empty form or a nothingness, but that it is foreclosed to past and present History, just as it is foreclosed to the place of places, the World, and that it is the only method for establishing the practice of thinking in a non-imaginary instance. Because it is the World and History that are imaginary and have a terrible materiality, it is not necessarily utopia. We will overlap two objectives here: the defense of non-philosophy against the (non-) philosophers that we are, only occasionally, and the introduction of philosophy to a rigorous future. Together they set out to definitively render, without any possible return to philosophical conformism or towards the facilities of the past and present, the non-philosophical enterprise understood as utopia or uchronia. Imagination and speculation, left to themselves and thus undistinguished, are quite good for participating in the grand game of History but have little value or worse for the Future which is unimaginable and unintelligible and must be maintained as such. MAN-IN-PERSON AS SUSPENSION OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL CHORA The point where philosophical resistance is concentrated is without a doubt the invention of the Name-of-Man, first name, oracular as much as axiomatic, of the determining cause for the non-philosophical posture. And that which concentrates the differends is the style of non-philosophy as identity that possesses the dual aspect, of discipline and of the oeuvre, of the theorem and of the oracle. But the real difficulty in understanding the simplicity of non-philosophy is profoundly hidden in the depths of philosophy itself. Because philosophy, from Parmenides to Derrida, even Levinas, continues to be a divided gesture, without a veritable immanence, transforming its thematic contents of transcendence in also forgetting to transform the operative transcendence in the element from which the ontology of surface is established which we will call, in memory of Plato, the chorismos. The general effect of the chora literally gives place to philosophy, demanding binding and sutures to which we will once and for all “oppose” the Man-in-person, his power of cloning, and his future being. All philosophy contains a hinter-philosophy in which it deploys its operations and weaves its tradition like an understudy of a topographical nature and in the best of cases being itself topological. Philosophy as well consists of two levels, its pre-ontological operative conditions on the one hand, and its superficial theme on the other, it too has its presupposed, but is not aware of it or erases it within the unity of appearance named Logos. Rightly, the Logos, and its flash or lightning nature, possesses a “dark precursor,” the chora, which is as much a virtual image, and philosophy, dazzled by its own lightning flash, seems to completely forget about it at the same time it sets itself up within it. Non-philosophy risks taking this same path, of confusing what it believes to be the real with its phantom double, contenting itself to working on the thematic level of philosophy, not its surface objects and its idle chatter (we stopped talking about this a long time ago and in any case they are merely simple materials for inducing a work of transformation), but the transcendence-form of its objects. In the end it risks, through precipitation, taking back up the heritage of philosophy, a heritage of a misunderstood presupposed, even more profound than the play of transcendences. This is what the imperative of the radicality of immanence meant, to treat immanence in an immanent manner, not to make a new object out of it. And from here we get non- (philosophy) and its refusal of the Platonic chorismos , symbol of all abstraction, and thus all transcendental appearance. There are no illusions. The message will leave a heritage in tattered pieces and interpretations. But it was difficult not to dispute the differend to its core. There will be complete confusion of the multiple, possible, and necessary effectuations of non-philosophy with its interpretations. The non-philosophical or human freedom of philosophical effectuation and the philosophical freedom of interpretation. Effectuations demand non-philosophy to return to zero from the point of view of its philosophical material and thus also but within these limits the formulation of its axioms , but in no way providing from the outset divergent interpretations of the aforementioned axioms. They are divergent because they do not take into account the material from which these axioms are derived within non-philosophy, and because they do not see themselves as symptoms of another vision of the World. The utterances of non-philosophy are not mathematical theorems and pure axioms, they merely have a mathematical aspect . They are, by their extraction or origin, mathematical and transcendental. And by their determined function in-Real, within non-philosophy, they are identically in-the-last-Humaneity entities which have an aspect of an axiom and an aspect of interpretation (or an oracular aspect as we say) that attempts (sometimes it is ourselves who provide the occasion) to isolate and transform, in complete freedom of interpretation. There will be an opportunity to complain about the complex character of the language of non-philosophy, an idiom saturated with classical references, sophisticated in a contemporary way. Its freedom of decision up against the whole of philosophy demands these effects of “complication” and “privatization,” as the saying goes. But it also demands fighting against the drift [ dérive ] of the pedagogical-all and the mediatic-all that leads philosophy into the shallow depths of opinion, which is the site of its impossible death. The noble idealism of “pop-philosophy” has been consumed into a “philo-reality;” against this we propose philo-fiction. Parricide, which is at the bottom of these interpretations and which we can judge as being quite fertile, although it has informed tradition, only takes place once or within one lone meaning. In regards to Parmenides, it was possible; Plato introduced the Other as non-being and language, bringing into existence the philosophical system of the World, but is it possible to repeat it again with the same fecundity in regards to non-philosophy, this time in introducing (non) religion or (non) art, still mixing them without taking into account this mixture, alternatively as a philosophical or religious resentment? If philosophy begins via a crime, it is no doubt obliged to continue down similar pathways, to the effect that the crimes of philosophy, once the founding crime has been committed, are a reaction of self-defense. It is undoubtedly from this that we get Marx’s declaration that history begins by tragedy and repeats itself or ends in farce. The preservation of rigor and fecundity is, in every respect, a psychologically difficult task within a theory such as non-philosophy. Having posited an essential objective of liberation in regards to philosophy and its services, one has often understood this objective as an authorization of providing particular interpretations of its axioms and ends up obliterating their scope. This ends up confusing, on one hand, two kinds of freedoms in regards to non-philosophy, the freedom of its interpretations and the freedom of its effectuations. On the other hand, any defense of “principles” against precipitated interpretations is immediately taxed with a will to orthodoxy, a prohibitive objection when we are dealing with, as is the case here, a heretical theory of thought. Nevertheless, it is time to stop confusing heresy as the cause of thought with an ideology of heresies, which is certainly not at all our object, but rather a form of normalization. As for the “disciplinary” aspect, which is not the only aspect, it demands something other than philosophical “answers to objections,” a precision in the definition and use of its procedures in the formation of utterances, since non-philosophy is neither a supplementary doctrine interior to philosophy nor a vision of the world but one whose priority is a “vision of Man,” or rather Man as “vision” that implies a theory and a practice of philosophy. In the end, struggle is only one aspect of non-philosophy, not its whole or telos, struggle coming only from its materiality. In particular, if the discipline of non-philosophy is inseparable from struggle, it is not a question of reducing the monomaniacal obsession of its “marching orders.” This would reduce its complexity and kill its indivisibility, deploying it in a “long march” and a form of Maoization whose philosophical presuppositions no longer have any pertinence here, a case of the One and the Two, which are now cloned and no longer tied together. More generally, non-philosophy is a complex thought composed of a multitude of aspects, which is to say, unilateral interpretations, of a philosophical origin but reduced by their determination in-the-last-instance . The “liberalism” of non-philosophy is merely one of the aspects of which it is capable, not an essence. Similarly, it is only capable of having a “Maoist” aspect. Let us generalize. The weakness of non-philosophy is due to a specific cause, the determination-in-the-last-Humaneity of a subject for the World. Everything that has a right to the philosophical city can be said about it in turn and in a retaliatory mode since Man contributes nothing of himself that Man takes from the World. We can consider non-philosophy as being pretentious, absurd, idealistic, empty, materialistic, formalistic, contradictory, modern, post-modern, Zen, Buddhist, Marxist; it endures or tolerates, perhaps “appeals” to, or at least renders possible, sarcasms, ironies, and insults without even talking about the misunderstandings, partly for the same reason as psychoanalysis. All of this goes beyond simple “deviations.” They are its aspects, which is to say, its “unilateral” philosophical interpretations in both senses of the word, being either sufficient coming from the mouth of philosophers, or reduced to their absolute dimension of sufficiency and totality in the mouths of non-philosophers, and both times due to the weakness and strength of Man-in-person as their determination only in-the-last-instance. The non-philosopher is certainly not a Saint Paul fantasizing about a new Church. The non-philosopher is either a (Saint) Sebastian whose flesh is pierced with as many arrows as there are Churches, or a Christ persecuted by a Saint Paul. What is engaged in here is the practice of retaliation. A negative rule of the non-philosophical ethics of outlawed discussion by way of argumentation (the sufficient is you, the orthodox one is always you, you are the fashionable one, and when a master you are someone else) that is founded on the confusion of effectuations of non-philosophy and of its overall interpretations. Retaliation is the law but as with any too-human law, it must acquire a dimension that displaces it, or rather emplaces it and takes away its authority but not all of its effectiveness. If the non-philosopher is only authorized by himself, which is to say by philosophy but limited by the Real-of-the-last-instance, its critique of other non-philosophers can merely be retaliatory under the same conditions, only by the Real limited in-the last-instance. THE TREE OF PHILOSOPHICAL SAINTLINESS The thematic horizon or material of these debates is in the relationships between philosophy, religion as gnosis, and non-philosophy. It is inevitable, regarding non-philosophers in general (whether they are non-philosophers by name or simply its neighbors) that we often end up evoking Marx’s Holy Family and imagining, arranged on the neighboring branches of the tree of philosophy and annexed, sometimes abusively, to non-philosophy, authors who would quite evidently and quite rightly refuse this label. So it is that we find, for example, a Saint Michel, a Saint Alain, a Saint Gilles 1 without even mentioning the youngest who aspire as well to the freedom of “saintliness” and who make their muted voices heard here. If there is a Holy Family of non-philosophers, it extends completely beyond these three, provided that the sectarian spirit can save us. This book is organized in the following manner: To begin, in order to recall the essential part of the problematic, we have organized a Summary of Non-Philosophy , a vade-mecum of notions and basic problems, in a classical style. Secondly, there is Clarifications On the Three Axioms of Non-Philosophy , designed to posit their proper use as much as to elucidate their meaning. Thirdly, an analysis of Philosophizability and Practicity , both being extreme constituents of philosophical material or the contents of the third axiom. Fourthly, the heart of this work: Let us Make a Tabula Rasa of the Future or of Utopia as Method . Fifthly, we have a theoretical outline of a non-institutional utopia, The International Organization of Non-Philosophy, L’Organisation Non-Philosophique Internationale, (ONPHI) already created in practice but under the conditions of possibility and functioning from which here we put into question “de jure,” thus not without a perplexity concerning “facts,” in any case, without the capability of “getting to the bottom of things.” Sixthly, an essay characterizing The Right and the Left of Non-Philosophy , a brief topology of several philosophizing and normalizing positions of proponents or tenants of this problematic. Seventhly, Rebel in the Soul: A Theory of Future Struggle , a systematic discussion starting from a confrontation of non-philosophical gnosis and non-religious gnosis to the extent that they pose, posed or perhaps still will pose themselves as rivals to non-philosophy in a mixture of fidelity and infidelity. Despite the fact that it can also be read as putting non-philosophy into perspective: it pits against a standard Platonism two contemporary appropriations of Gnosticism. On the basis of the paradigm of Man who never ceases to come as the Future-in-person, each one of these moments strives to reestablish not the “true” non-philosophy and its orthodoxy, but the minimal conditions to respect in order to allow for its maximum fecundity. And in order to bring about one of the last possibilities of its development, making explicit Humaneity as a utopia-for-the-World. In introducing these considerations in the form of a “testament” and “ultimatum,” we want to indicate two things: First, that this is the last time we will intervene in order to caution non-philosophers against the temptation of returning and looking backwards towards philosophy. Only a disillusioned nostalgia for the former World and its traditions barely remain permissible to us.… Secondly, that non-philosophy is also a sort of ultimatum for considering one’s life and transforming one’s thought from the perspective of a uni-version rather than a conversion. Man as future is this ultimatum in action, not an impatient self-proclaimed genius, and philosophy is his testament. It is obviously the ultimatum that determines this testament as “old” with a view towards a life that is, itself, non-testamentary. In and of itself, the “old” can never bear a veritable eschaton. Thus, this book intersects according to the logic of this paradigm, under the sign of the ultimate or “last” as future, philosophy as testament and cautionary note for maintaining the non-philosophical oeuvre as “future” or “utopian.” We will see that between these two dimensions it cradles a theory of struggle. In the end, this book envisions non-philosophers in multiple ways. It inevitably sees them as subjects of knowledge, most often academics insofar as life in the world demands, but above all as close relatives of three great human types. The analyst and political militant are quite obvious, for non-philosophy is close to psychoanalysis and Marxism insofar as it transforms the subject in transforming philosophy. Here again, one must have a sense not of certain nuances but of aspects (of the interpretations, albeit unilateralized) and not in order to construct a simple proletarization or militarization of thought as theory. To be rigorous, rather than authoritarian or spiteful, is its task. And lastly, non-philosophy is a close relative of the spiritual but definitely not the spiritualist. Those who are spiritual are not at all spiritualists, for the spiritual oscillate between fury and tranquil rage, they are great destroyers of the forces of Philosophy and the State, which are united under the name of Conformism. They haunt the margins of philosophy, gnosis, mysticism, science fiction and even religions. Spiritual types are not only abstract mystics and quietists; they are heretics for the World. The task is to bring their heresy to the capacity of utopia, and their utopia to the capacity of the paradigm. NOTES We will recognize allusions, and sometimes references, to closely related or distant themes, but which are related, in the work of Michel Henry, Alain Badiou and via the representative of “non-religious” gnosis of a Platonic origin, in Gilles Grelet. It goes without saying that these discussions are current and local, neither concerning the ensemble of doctrines nor prejudging the eventual evolution of certain amongst them. This concerns defining certain proximities with non-philosophy (rather than adversaries which in some sense they are) and typological and emblematic differends (rather than conflicts with a certain author). (shrink)

ABSTRACT The philosophical tradition approaches to morals have their grounds predominantly on metaphysical and theological concepts and theories. Among the traditional ethics concepts, the most prominent is the Divine Command Theory (DCT). As per the DCT, God gives moral foundations to the humankind by its creation and through Revelation. Morality and Divinity are inseparable since the most remote civilization. These concepts submerge in a theological framework and are largely accepted by most followers of the three Abrahamic traditions: Judaism, Christianity, and (...) Islam: the greatest part of the human population. Holding faith and Revelation for its grounds, the Divine Command Theories are not strictly subject to the demonstration. The opponents to the Divine Command conception of morals, grounded in the impossibility of demonstration of its metaphysical and religious assumptions, have tried for many centuries (albeit unsuccessfully) to devalue its importance. They held the argument that it does not show material evidence and logical coherence and, for this reason, cannot be taken into account for scientific nor philosophical purposes. It is just a belief and, as so, should be understood. Besides these extreme oppositions, many other concepts contravene the Divine Command theories, in one or another way, in part or in full. Many philosophers and social scientists, from the classic Greek philosophy up to the present date, for instance, sustain that morality is only a construct, and thus culturally relative and culturally determined. However, this brings many other discussions and imposes the challenge to determine what is the meaning of culture, which elements of culture are morally determinant, and finally, what are the boundaries of such relativity. Moral determinists claim that everything related to human behavior, including morality, is determined, once free will does not exist. More recently, modern thinkers argued that there is a strict science of morality. However, the scientific method alone, despite explaining several facts and evidence, cannot enlighten the entire content and full meaning of ethics. Morals’ understanding requires a broader perception, and an agreement among philosophers, which they have never achieved. All of these questions have many different configurations depending on each philosophical strand, and start complex analysis and endless debates, as long as many of them are reciprocally conflictive. The universe and the atmosphere involving this thesis are the dominions of all these conceptual conflicts, observed from an objective and evolutionary standpoint. Irrespective of this circumstance and its intrinsic importance, however, these questions are far distant from the methodological approach of an analytical discussion on objective morals, what is, indeed, the aim and scope of this work. We should briefly revisit these prominent traditional theories because this thesis shelters a comparative study, and its assumptions at least differ profoundly from all traditional theories. Therefore, it becomes necessary offering direct and specific elements of comparison to the reader, for the right criticism, dispensing interruptive researches. However, even revisiting the traditional theories, for this comparative and critical exposure purpose, they will be kept by the side of our main concerns, as “aliena materia.” Irrespective of the validity of any or all of the elements of this discussion, and their meaning as the philosophical universe of this thesis, the purpose of this work is demonstrating and justifying the existence and meaning of prehistoric moral archetypes arisen directly from the very first social needs and efforts for survival. These archetypes are the definition of the essential foundation of ethics, its aggregation to the collective unconscious and corresponding logic organization and transmission to evolutionary stages of the human genome and different relations space-time, irrespective of any contemporary experience of the individuals. The system defined by these archetypes composes an evolutionary human social model. Is this a metaethical position? Yes, it is. Moreover, as in any metaethical reasoning, we should look carefully for the best and coherent routes, as the Analytical Philosophy offers them. Thus, this work should reasonably demonstrate that morals are not a cultural product of the civilized men or modern societies and that despite being subject to several cultural relative aggregations and subtractions, its essential foundations are archetypal and have never structurally changed. This reasoning induces that morality is an original attribute of the “homo sapiens”; it is not a property and nor an accident: it integrates the human essence and belongs to the realm of the ontological human identity. The human phenomena is a continuing process, playing its role between random determination and free will, and we need to question how morality began and how did it come to us in the present. (shrink)

English summary: The eleven articles of the present volume are to a large extent based upon papers delivered at a conference about Religion and Conflict, organized by Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Religionsphilosophie (DGR). The book containing these papers, plus a number of additional articles, is divided into two parts, both of which tackle conflicts within one or among different religion(s). Whereas the first part is primarily devoted to major ontological, ethical and anthropological - and thus, in effect, more abstract and general (...) - questions (for instance, questions about the nature, cause(s) and anthropological implications of religious conflicts), the second addresses a number of more specific issues, all of which are focused upon the chief question of how adequately to perceive and/or to solve religious conflicts in the sense described above. Discussed are, among other things, the concept of and the conflict between so-called 'sacred texts' in Christianity, Judaism and Islam; the conflict between naturalism and theology; the purported 'absolutism' of Christian monotheism as a source of interreligious conflict, etc. German text. German description: Die Beitrage des vorliegenden Bandes gehen grosstenteils auf eine Tagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft fur Religionsphilosophie zuruck. Die erste Halfte ('Grundlagen: Zur Theorie religioser Konflikte') behandelt das Thema in sechs Beitragen aus philosophischer und fundamentaltheologischer Perspektive, und zwar primar mit Blick auf die ontologischen bzw. semantischen, handlungstheoretischen, ethischen, geschichtsphilosophischen, erkenntnistheoretischen und anthropologischen Implikationen religioser Konflikte. Der zweite Teil (Fallanalysen: Zur Wahrnehmung und Bewaltigung von Konflikten in und mit der Religion) bietet funf religionsphilosophische und hermeneutisch-theologische Analysen exemplarischer religioser Konfliktfelder unter der Leitfrage der Konfliktwahrnehmung und -bewaltigung. Diskutiert wird das Problem heiliger Schriften in Judentum, Christentum und Islam; der Konflikt zwischen Theologie und Naturalismus; der Absolutheitsanspruch des christlichen Monotheismus; das religiose Konfliktpotential politischer Umbruche am Beispiel Sudafrika; die dialogorientierte Interaktion als Konfliktbewaltigungsstrategie im Religionsunterricht. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 285 than" which is both immanent and transcendent, a kind of "coincidentia oppositorum" beyond logic and definition. It is the realm of the "person" within which, although the tragic conflict is not resolved, there arises the free self from whose non-dual perspective the unity and eternity of life are seen. Within this realm the individual gains an illumination the result of which is "amor fad," his free (...) decision to affirm his being. In this act of decision lies the "meaning" and "value" of life. The substance and point of Miss Bauer's book is to show the connection between the metaphysical ground of Simmel's concept of the tragic and its manifestations in different aspects of human experience. Her account is especially interesting in her chapter on the "tragic opposition" in which as an example of a tragic personality she cites Socrates who, by his refusal to flee from his prison, freely embraced his fate and, by choosing to die, confirmed his decisive, binding truth that the heavenly powers remain silent to the questions asked by a doubting and despairing humanity. His act declares that the individual must really stand alone in the world, taking counsel only from himself. Miss Bauer's book is written with a sympathetic understanding of Simmel's philosophy. By opening our eyes to the significant in human existence she succeeds in showing file relevance of his thought to our time. RIA STAVR1DES Vassar College Dialogo con Maurizio Blondel. By Michele Federico Sciacca. (Milano: Carlo Marzorati Editore, 1962. Pp. 159. L. 1300.) Sciacca has gathered here various articles which he had written about Blondel as well as new notes about this French thinker. Blondel struggled against the cult of science seeking to vindicate man's religious needs. Man longs for an end which transcends the natural order. Hence philosophy cannot ignore religion which points to a supernatural human destiny. According to Blondel, God is the only Word which answers the search of man and makes his action both fruitful and progressive. PAUL T. FUHRMANN Columbia Theological Seminary Essays in Ontology. By E. G. Allaire, M. Brodbeck, R. Grossman, H. Hochberg, R. G. Turnbull. Vol. I, Iowa Publications in Philosophy. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963. Pp. 216.) Essays in Ontology is the introductory volume of a new series of monographs to be published by the Department of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. The first volume, as its title indicates, is a collection of essays whose authors are closely affiliated with the Iowa Philosophy Department, being faculty members there now (Allaire and Turnbull) or former students (Hochberg, Grossman, and Brodbeck). Considered as a representative display of talent, the collection is somewhat unbalanced, since twelve of the fourteen papers are by three of the contributors, Allaire, Grossman, and Hochberg, while the other two are contributed by Brodbeck and Turnbull. It is also a matter of some disappointment that eleven of the fourteen papers have seen the light of print elsewhere; although this feeling is somewhat offset by the impact of sustained inquiry into one philosophical problem which the papers make when brought together in this way. The three new papers are "Particulars and 286 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Time" and "Common Names" by Grossman, and "The Tractatus: Nominalistic or Realistic?" by Allaire. With the exception of May Brodbeck's elegant analysis of John Dewey's philosophy, Edwin Allaire's article on Berkeley, and Herbert Hochberg's disquisition on Quine's supposed rejection of mental entities, all the essays concern themselves, in one way or another, with the problem of universals. Sometimes the problem is looked at independently of any historical context--as in the first seven papers---or as emerging from such a historical setting, as in Robert Turnbull's tightly argued discussion of Ockham's logic, Reinhardt Grossman's investigation into Frege's ontology, and Herbert Hochberg's article on the status of the "non-natural properties" mentioned by G. E. Moore in his early works. There is thus a common core of subject matter in the collection; but even beyond that, the papers reveal a tightly knit community of philosophical opinion. The writers share a common outlook on what the problem of universals is... (shrink)

A number of important religious views entail that the ontological and epistemic relations between religion and morality are tighter than most secular thinkers suppose. We will focus on three theistic metaethical accounts of moral phenomena and moral knowledge: natural law theories, divine command theories, and divine will theories. These three types of accounts are among the most dominant in the philosophical literature on theistic ethics in contemporary anglophone philosophy, perhaps owing to their connection to major Western religions such as Christianity, (...) Islam, and Judaism. It is important to note, however, that they hardly exhaust the conceptual space. Intellectual traditions of other religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, traditional Chinese religions, and African religions raise distinct philosophical questions about and offer a host of alternative views on the relationship between religion and morality (Jeffrey 2019). We close by offering a few such examples, though it is outside the scope of this chapter to provide a comprehensive survey of available views. (shrink)

This essay studies the unfolding of Levinas' concept of transcendence from 1935 to his 1984 talk entitled "Transcendence and Intelligibility." I discuss how Levinas frames transcendence in light of enjoyment, shame, and nausea in his youthful project of a counter-ontology to Heidegger's Being and Time. In Levinas' essay, transcendence is the human urge to get out of being. I show the ways in which Levinas' early ontology is conditioned by historical circumstances, but I argue that its (...) primary aim is formal and phenomenological; it adumbrates formal structures of human existence. Levinas' 1940s ontology accentuates the dualism in being, between what amount to a light and a dark principle. This shift in emphasis ushers in a new focus for transcendence, which is now both sensuous and temporal, thanks to the promise of fecundity. Totality and Infinity (1961) pursues a similar onto-logic, while shifting the locus of transcendence to a non-sexuate other. The final great work, Otherwise than Being or beyond Essence (1974) offers a hermeneutic phenomenology of transcendence-in-immanence. It rethinks Husserl's focus on the transcendence of intentionality and its condition of possibility in the passive synthesis of complex temporality. If the 1974 strategy 'burrows beneath' the classical phenomenological syntheses, it also incorporates unsuspected influences from French psychology and phenomenology. This allows Levinas to develop a philosophical conception of transcendence that is neither Husserl's intentionality nor Heidegger's temporal ecstases, in what amounts to an original contribution to a phenomenology both hermeneutic and descriptive. (shrink)

This book is the first comprehensive examination of the ethical parameters of paganism when considered as a world religion alongside Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism. The issues of evil, value and idolatry from a pagan perspective are analyzed as part of the Western ethical tradition from the Sophists and Platonic schools through the philosophers Spinoza, Hume, Kant and Nietzsche to such contemporary thinkers as Grayling, Mackie, MacIntyre, Habermas, Levinas, Santayana, et cetera From a more practical viewpoint, a delineation of (...) applied pagan ethics is then presented in connection with current moral issues such as same-sex union, recreational drugs, environmental awareness, abortion and terrorism. Finally, overviews of sectarian pagan ethics (Shinto, Santeria, Heathenism, Druidry, Romuva, Slavic, Kemeticism, Classical and Wicca) provide both the general and pagan reader with an understanding of the provocative range and differentiation of pagan ethical thought. The book approaches the Western ethical tradition as an historical development and a continuing dialogue. The novelty of this approach lies in its consideration of paganism as a legitimate voice of religious spirituality rather than a satanic aberration or ridiculous childish behavior. The book is aimed at both the contemporary Western pagan and anyone with an interest in the moral dilemmas of our times and the desire to engage in the global ethical discussion.Among the more important features of the book are its presentation of a re-evaluation of idolatry, the notion of the virtue value, the richness of the pagan tradition, and the expansion of Western ethics beyond its Christian heritage. (shrink)

The terms immanence and transcendence have played a significant role in philosophical thought since its inception. Implicit in the notions of immanence and transcendence, as typified within the history of ideas, is often a separation and division between the human and the godly. This division has served to generate ontologies of isolation and set up epistemologies that can be both binary and divided. The terms immanence and transcendence thus sit at the heart of contemporary onto-epistemic accounts of (...) the world. As such, in seeking to examine the nature of what is, this paper traces a line through the history of ideas in an attempt to clarify the connections and dissonances in the notions of immanence and transcendence. This is done for the purpose of demonstrating what philosophical and religious accounts may offer in attempting to create a sound account of the godly and thus the world in a secular age. (shrink)

In part I I reply to Seymour Feldman's criticism of volume 1 of The Marrano of Reason. I try to show that Professor Feldman misreads me, first, by overlooking the transformation of Spinoza's Marrano traits from the world of religion to the world of reason; second, by failing to recognize the diversity of Marrano responses as part of my own thesis; and thirdly, by paying no heed to the mental (or, phenomenological) structures and analysis upon which a good deal of (...) my argument relies. Since many of Feldman's particular points hinge upon the first two points, I need not address each item separately. This leaves a few smaller points. I also restate the methodological boundaries of my ?Marrano? thesis, what the book does and does not do. In parts II and III I respond to criticisms on volume 2 of The Adventures of Immanence from Henry Allison and Richard Schacht. I admit the book calls for a chapter on Lessing and the Pantheismusstreit, and also on existentialists like Sartre (and Heidegger too), though not Kierkegaard. I defend, against Allison, my not self?evident decision to include Kant, whose position I characterize as ?immanent humanism?. Although Kant opposed reason to nature, his revolution made the human mind, rather than a transcendent God, the source of objectivity in knowledge, morality in action, legitimacy in politics, and even sanctity in religion. I also defend my reconstruction of Marx's immanentist ontology. I further clarify two crucial distinctions: a philosophy of immanence is not necessarily the same as ?Spinozism?, and is not necessarily critical. Hence my protagonists need not be strict Spinozists, or critical philosophers, to figure in the ?adventures of immanence?. My debate with Schacht concerns the question whether Nietzsche and Marx saw the immanent world as divine (which I deny); the place of pantheism in these thinkers (in Nietzsche I see it as a temptation which amor fati has to overcome); and whether Hegel's discovery of the role of the social world in mediating knowledge depended on his metaphysical anthropomorphism (viewing the immanent domain as subject and Spirit, and assigning the human race a privileged ontological ? and theological ? role in it: I deny that dependence). Finally, in the reply to both Allison and Schacht I rephrase my criticism of Nietzsche's ?cult of transitoriness and explain my preference for ?tentative rationality"? (shrink)

Is God dead? -- The western split : transcendent, deity, desacralised nature -- The western split : God's otherness, humanity's degradation -- The western split : gender discrimination, its origins, and its consequences -- Energy and divinity -- Divinity within -- The Christian doctrine of incarnation : restricted immanence -- Incarnation and atonement mythology -- Creativity, divine, and human -- Divinity and ethics -- Religion and science -- The problem of evil : providence -- Death and beyond.

A new form of ethics suggested by the Francophone philosopher M. Onfray concerns, first of all, the resignation from faith in a transcendent God, which is substituted with an undefined sacrum in immanence. This new form of ethics is, today, becoming a popular alternative to religious ethics. However, traditional, and new ethics should not be treated as separate sets, as they do not necessarily compete with each other. Systems of spiritual development related to specific denominations will always provide inspiration even (...) for atheists’ ethics. The latter can indicate that, apart from religion, there is also a spirituality that can develop in a person. Nihilism is not the only alternative to religion, as sometimes the defenders of the old religious order try to show. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), a French Philosopher and a Jew, became known first for his role in the introduction of Husserl’s phenomenology to France, and later for his criticisms of Husserl and Heidegger. As the Holocaust gave a significant impact on many theologians and philosophers to establish their theoretical systems, Levinas realized how ethic of responsibility was important through his personal tragic experience. What most peculiar character of his experience is that it leads him to cast a doubt a subject-oriented modern (...) reason. I will explore the modern subjectivity through the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. As Nietzsche mentioned earlier in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, is subject dead? Is it no longer meaningful to discuss the modernity in the postmodern ear?Should the trend of anti-subjectivity in the postmodernity be the only alternative? Those questions are underlain this study. For him, the preeminence of the inviolability of the human being must be regarded as the initial point of departure and final destiny. According to Levinas, philosophy is open to its role of significance only insofar as it describes the ethical situation of the responsible self that precedes the metaphysical subject. A bold assertion against the modern perquisite of theory becomes a signature aphorism of Livinas’ work: “ethics is first philosophy.” For Levinas, ethics is not a question of adjusting one’s adherence to transcendent or historical laws or inner principles. Whereas philosophy traditionally gives priority to inner subjectivity and treats ethics as derivative, Levinas’ philosophy stresses that knowing occurs within and is a result of the intersubjective relation. The subject as hostage to the Other, he writes, “has been neither the experience nor the proof of the infinite, but the witnessing of the infinite.” This subjective condition of the ‘I’ is what Levinas calls the responsible self. This article explores whether Emmanuel Levinas's ethic of the Other can be regarded as a theological discourse. After publishing Totality and Infinity, there have been manyserious questions of the relationship between transcendence and immanence; infinity and the finite among many philosophers and theologians. Interestingly enough, Levinas tries to mediate these concepts by his ethic of the Other. I examine how Levinas deals with the tension and difficulty of these two areas in his ethic of the Other. As a French phenomenologist, Jean-Luc Marion already mentioned, this kind of attempt has confronted a double-bind dilemma. One is that it would be a question of phenomena that are objectively definable but lose their religious specialty; and the other is that it would be a question of phenomena that are especially religious but cannot be described objectively. In this sense, Levinas’s ethic of the Other gives us an insight that what philosophy of religion would be. A great deal of information about such great philosophers does not always guarantee sound philosophical reflection. As Levinas’ philosophy was developed in his struggle with Heidegger’s philosophy in the matrix of Husserl’s phenomenology, my philosophical reflection on Levinas’ ethics has to be examined by those who are experts in various philosophical areas. Many members of WCP from all around the world will provide me more mature philosophical thinking, and their advice and expertise will be invaluable. In addition, chances to meet great visiting scholars who will come from all over the world will be also one of the prestigious privileges to articulate my thinking. I look forward to interacting with the great scholars who will visit Seoul National University, and in these interactions, to clarify and better articulate my ideas. (shrink)

Článek se věnuje nejnovější knize Charlese Taylora Secular Age (2007). Poukazuje na její kořeny v hegeliánství a v novějších kritikách modernity a probírá některé námitky vůči Taylorově koncepci včetně Taylorových odpovědí. Taylor představuje dva typy současných etických projektů. Na jedné straně tzv. výlučný humanismus, na druhé straně imanentní antihumanismus. A smyslem jeho genealogie moderního sekularismu je ukázat vzájemnou podmíněnost mezi antihumanismem, humanismem a religiozitou s tím, že bez nějaké formy transcendence se každý západní hodnotový systém vystavuje nepřekonatelným tenzím, aby (...) následně navrhl koncept originality volající k následování jako spojnici hlavního nároku křesťanství ztělesněného v pojmu lásky k bližnímu s moderním uměním jako náhražkovým náboženstvím. Taylorova práce je nejen v tomto ohledu postavena na jeho celoživotním zájmu o Hegelovu filosofii, v níž se hledá takový způsob, jak spojit etiku autenticity se smyslem pro společenství, který by překonal omezení reflektující racionality. Taylorovo obohacení Hegela můžeme chápat jako snahu nahradit tradiční nárok lásky k bližnímu srozumitelnějším pojmem podpory rozmanitosti v jednotě (resp. pojmem kultury). The essay examines Charles Taylor’s latest book The Secular Age (2007) by unveiling its Hegelian roots together with its debt to other critics of modernity and by considering some objections as well as Taylor’s answers. Taylor sketches two types of contemporary ethical projects. On the one hand he considers exclusive humanism, on the other the immanent antihumanism. The moral of Taylor’s story of modern secularism comes to his claim that the anti-humanism is enabled by humanism and humanism again by religiosity. According to him this comes to indispensability of religion: namely, some notion of transcendence is necessary for coherence of any set of values available to western man. Actually the originality inspiring its following is what he understands as the key element that is shared by the central claim of Christianity embodied in the notion of love (agape) overcoming the rigorism of explicit rules on the one hand and modern art as Ersatzreligion.(Not only) this aspect of Taylor’s recent work is rooted in his lifelong interest in Hegel, who looked for such pairing of the ethics of authenticity with a sense for community that could overcome the limits of reflective rationality. We can interpret Taylor’s amendement to Hegel as a substitution of „support for differentiation in unity“ (or simply „culture“) for „love for neighbour“. (shrink)

The impermanence of human affairs is a major theme in Spinoza’s discussions of political histories, and from our present-day perspective it is both intriguing and ironic to see how this very theme has played out in the evolving fate of Spinoza’s association with atheism. While Spinoza’s contemporaries charged him with atheism in order to impugn his philosophy (and sometimes his character), in our times many lay readers and some scholars portray Spinoza as an atheist in order to commemorate his role (...) as a founder of modern secularism. In this paper, I will argue that Spinoza deserves neither vilification nor praise for being an atheist, for the simple reason that he was not one (unless one employs the term ‘atheism’ in a very peculiar sense). I have chosen the current topic as my contribution to a volume focused on the TTP, the Ethics, and their interrelations because it is precisely these two books which brought about the common reactionary accusation of atheism by Spinoza’s contemporaries. Addressing Spinoza’s 1663 book, Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy, Bayle writes: “Spinoza appears as orthodox in that book about the nature of God.” As we shall shortly see, Descartes too was accused of atheism by some of his contemporaries (though not so by Bayle). The latter designates his target quite explicitly: “[Spinoza’s] Tractatus Theologico Politicus, printed in Amsterdam, in the year 1670, is a pernicious and execrable book which contains all the seeds of the Atheism he plainly discovered in his Opera Posthuma.” François Lamy, in his 1696 Le nouvel athéisme renversé, also focused on the Ethics and the TTP in his attack on Spinoza’s atheism. Bayle’s reference to the Opera Posthuma is ostensibly targeting the Ethics at least primarily, if not uniquely. Even the most suspicious and distrustful mind would have to labor hard in order to find atheism in the Hebrew Grammar, or even in the Tractatus Politicus where Spinoza argues that it is not within the power, and hence right, of the commonwealth to induce people to adopt utterly absurd beliefs, such as “that the whole is greater than its part or that God does not exist.” The TTP and the Ethics are the works where Spinoza launches his merciless attack on anthropocentric thinking and anthropomorphic religion. Spinoza’s panentheism (“quicquid est, in Deo est”) constitutes the metaphysical foundation of the Ethics, and it is repeatedly and clearly alluded to in the TTP. Since it is these two elements – (1) Spinoza’s open assertions of panentheism and (2) his critique of andromorphic conceptions of God – which are the historical grounds for the atheism charge, it seems natural that the merit of this charge should be decided primarily by examination of these two foundational works. I will proceed in the following manner. In the first part of the paper, we will make our first acquaintance with the imputation of atheism by Spinoza’s contemporaries and Spinoza’s response to the charge (or lack thereof). In the second part, I discuss three broad strategies, or hermeneutic avenues, that have been pursued to impute atheism to Spinoza. The first of the three was dominant in Spinoza’s time, while the latter two were employed more recently. These strategies are not mutually exclusive and we can find occasionally various combinations of different shades of these three strategies. In this part, I will also raise some preliminary questions about the cogency of the hermeneutics employed by each strategy. In the third and fourth parts of the paper, I will discuss a small selection of key texts from the Ethics and the TTP, respectively, and argue that the atheist readings fail to make sense of these key passages (unless one adopts an extreme hermeneutics of suspicion which could allegedly find any view harbored in any text). Let me stress that this selection of passages is far from comprehensive, and that dozens of other passages can be adduced to establish the very same point. I hope by the end of the fourth part to convince the reader of the deep problems besetting the atheist readings. In the fifth and last part, I show that both panentheism and the critique of anthropomorphic religion and anthropomorphic conceptions of providence were quite common within rabbinic discourse. Thus, I will argue that if we are not in the business of announcing that both Maimonides and the Kabbalists were atheists, we should avoid the same imputation to Spinoza. Underlying my argument in this final part is the claim that at least some perceptions of Spinoza as an atheist are instances of what could be termed conceptual colonialism, i.e. the enforcement of the categories of a hegemonic culture (in this case, Western Christianity ) on minority cultures (in the current case, rabbinic Judaism). To be clear, this attitude need not be motivated by ill intentions or racism. It is always tempting and easy to explain the unfamiliar through the familiar, but conceptual stagnation and insistence on imposing the categories of the familiar on other cultures may quickly lead to deep distortion and blindness, despite one’s best intentions. Unless one is exceedingly careful to avoid the – completely natural – temptation to impose one’s own categories on a foreign culture (and to look for the coin only under the street light), one is likely to end up with distorted conceptions of the relevant alien culture, despite one’s best intentions. (shrink)

Both Foucault and Deleuze define ethics as a form of creative activity. Yet, given certain ontological features indicated by both thinkers, ethics must be more than just creative and critical activity. Forgoing a transcendent ground for ethics, the ontological condition of ethics – what Foucault calls liberté and Deleuze calls the plane of immanence – is an opening for change that makes possible normalizing modes of existence as well transformative ones. In this context, ethics must be a practice that comprehends (...) the dangers of such open-ended creation. The concept of problematization, emphasized by Foucault and Deleuze, leads to an enhanced understanding of their conception of ethics. On this understanding, ethics is a practice of problematization requiring a determination and assessment of the most pressing problems to which one must respond rather than attempt to solve once and for all. Ethics is necessarily a responsive engagement with the problems of one’s present. (shrink)

This book offers a cutting-edge interpretation of the philosophy of F.W.J. Schelling by critically reconsidering the interpretations of some of his "successors". It argues that Schelling's philosophy should be read as an ontology of immanence, highlighting its relevance for ongoing debates on ethics and freedom. The book builds on a key notion from Schelling's Philosophy of Revelation where he outlines the process through which transcendence must return to immanence in order to be grasped and understood. The author identifies Jaspers, (...) Heidegger, and Deleuze as the main interpreters of Schelling's philosophical activity, highlighting their relevance for subsequent Schelling scholarship. Heidegger and Jaspers refer to Schelling's philosophy in negative terms, namely as an incomplete and unviable philosophical system, whereas Deleuze holds the immanent core of Schelling's ontological discourse in high regard. The author's analysis demonstrates that reading Schelling's philosophy as an ontology of immanence not only avoids Heidegger's and Jaspers's criticisms but is also more fitting to Schelling's original meaning. Accordingly, his reading allows us to fully grasp Schelling's thought in all its strength and consistency: as a philosophy that avoids metaphysical abstractions and maintains the concreteness of concepts like God, nature, freedom by binding them to a solid and material account of Being. Finally, the author uses Schelling to propose an innovative reading of freedom as a matter of resistance, and of philosophy as an activity whose main purpose is that of seeking the actual extent and place of (human) life and freedom within nature. The author originally emphasises the relevance of these conclusions on contemporary debates in Postcolonial Critical Theory and Environmental Ethics. Schelling, Freedom, and the Immanent Made Transcendent. From Philosophy of Nature to Environmental Ethics will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in 19th-century Continental philosophy, German idealism, and Postcolonial Critical Theory and Environmental Ethics. (shrink)

People's desire not to limit the meaning of Hancang driving force, continuous development and self-transcendence, which is people from within and beyond the root driving force. The so-called "inner beyond" is not a process of idealism, which began with the desire, from the bottom of the body, and go up on the layer by layer through the heart of the development process裡and mental flexibility, and would therefore have to enhance and transform. We regard the body as I desire the (...) presence of mode. Significance by the driving force in the body and thus close to the appearance, at first non-verbal, and then eventually completed in the language of representation. Through a variety of different non-linguistic representation, the meaning of the body of the driving force to obtain specific and differentiation, as music, art, dance, drama art form ... ... and so on. These different forms of art of common origins, is made ​​to understand the forms of physical exercise, as they are each other's differences, then is made ​​to understand the form of different, such as voice, image, attitude ... ... and so the nature and rules lawyers, and the rise because of their differences on the artistic and cultural expressions of different, and even the formation of the various arts precinct. In order to film art integrated voice, image and body movement, presented at the time of the current moving image, to the above description of the story. Different types of art is "the desire of the induced mover", which provides clear instructions and guidance In order to man the desire for meaning. The meaning of desire is the driving force of development of art in different fields to cross-border basic driving force. Story has entered into a description of the classification of the appearance of language, its basic features is metaphorical. Cross-disciplinary domain of the past will pin their hopes on the concepts and logical reasoning and arguments permit. Today, the language of metaphor for understanding the nature, making metaphor and narrative clues as cross-domain, and in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and even among. The reason why life events, actions and circumstances can be constructed to the story, because there I am with the interaction between multiple otherness, its impetus came from one continuous extrapolation, and extrapolation of each other. And diversity of his stories were always the people the story, and always coming to the multivariate description of those who hear him. Through stories, we witness In order to the meaning of life, but always to witness the way metaphor and description of each story to each other through mutual enrichment. Description of the future, after all, the story, no matter real or imagined, there is established based on the relationship regardless of which I was with him who have the freedom in the relationship, a relationship in freedom. It is also across the world who can not break the fundamental driving force and field-based. This paper assumes that there is an undetermined dynamic energy for meaningfulness in human desire, which develops and transcends any particular realization. This is the original energy by which human beings could attain transcendence by way of immanence, which is not an idealist process, but rather originated from a body-based desire that develops upwards and fuller to integrate the mental and the spiritual. Representability, first non-linguistic and then linguistic, is the access to meaning for our desire that takes body as its mode of existence. Through different forms of representation, such as sounds, pictures and gestures ... etc., the project of meaning is specified. The movement of body in intelligible forms is the common origin of music, dancing and performative arts. Cultural difference and artistic boundaries are based upon differences in the nature and rule of these intelligible forms. The art of filming, which synthesizes image, music and body movement in presenting images moving in time so as to tell stories of various kinds. All forms of art are "inducers of desire" by articulating, determining and guiding our desire for meaning. This dynamic development of our desire for meaning is the common basic energy by which we can cross the borders of different arts. Story-telling presupposes linguistic representation accessible to our meaning dynamism. In the past, concepts and logical reasoning and argumentation were taken to be the hope for interdisciplinary research. But now, with the better understanding we have of the metaphoric nature of language, metaphors and narratives are taken to be the clue for a cross-bordering effort in different sciences, human , social and natural. If there are events, actions and plots in human existence to be constructed as stories, it is because there is always interaction with multiple others, the dynamism of it consisting in our incessant act of strangification and mutual strangification. Stories are always stories about one self with multiple others and told to multiple others. By telling stories, we witness a particular way of meaningful life, always metaphorically interpreted. We achieve mutual enrichment by telling stories to each other. The ultimate foundation of cross-bordering in arts and scientific disciplines consists in the ontology of dynamic relation, in which there is relatedness in freedom and freedom in being related, and this is the ground on which all our life stories, both real and imaginative, are based. (shrink)

The article considers a particular case of Richard Kearney's characteristic hermeneutical exploration of `the possible' as an `imaginative' way of casting light upon philosophical issues. This particular case is his recent hermeneutical and phenomenological consideration of `Otherness' in the context of philosophy of religion. This consideration, strongly influenced by philosophers such as Heidegger, Levinas, Ricoeur and Derrida, is developed in two of his recent works Strangers, Gods and Monsters and The God Who May Be . The article examines how he (...) seeks to navigate an interpretation of divine otherness as an ethical appeal which escapes the dilemma of a God either so transcendent as to be anonymous or so immanent as to be a mere projection. It outlines how, rejecting onto-theology in favour of eschatology, Kearney envisages the divine as an ethically enabling possibility. This possibility, he claims, enables us to achieve, beyond our own intrinsic resources, an ethical order of justice and love through which the kingdom of God — the God Who May Be — is accomplished. There is a co-relativity between the divine as enabling possibility and humanity which accomplishes this possibility. It investigates the way in which Kearney seeks to legitimize, within a phenomenological frame of reference, an experiential affirmation of this conception of divine transcendence as eschatological possibility. It argues that this phenomenological consideration needs to be qualified and complemented by certain metaphysical considerations which Kearney disputes. Key Words: eschatology • ethics • God • hermeneutics • metaphysics • Otherness • phenomenology • possibility. (shrink)

Phenomenology, understood as a philosophy of immanence, has had an ambiguous, uneasy relationship with transcendence, with the wholly other, with the numinous. If phenomenology restricts its evidence to givenness and to what has phenomenality, what becomes of that which is withheld or cannot in principle come to givenness? In this paper I examine attempts to acknowledge the transcendent in the writings of two phenomenologists, Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein (who attempted to fuse phenomenology with Neo-Thomism), and also consider the (...) influence of the existentialist Karl Jaspers, who made transcendence an explicit theme of his writing. I argue that Husserl does recognize the essential experience of transcendence within immanence; even the idea of a physical thinghas “dimensions of infinity” included within it. Similarly, he asserts profoundly that every “outside” is what it is only as understood from the inside. Jaspers toomakes the experience of transcendence central to human existence; it is the very measure of my own depth. For Edith Stein, everything temporal points towardthe timeless structural ground which makes it what it is. Transcendence is an intrinsic part of being itself. Furthermore, the very lack of self-sufficiency of my own self shows that the self requires a ground outside itself, in the transcendent. There is strong convergence between the three thinkers studied on the concept of transcendence, which is indeed a central, if largely unacknowledged, concept in phenomenology both in Husserl and his followers (Stein), but also, throughJaspers, in Heidegger. (shrink)

In Transcendent Love: Dostoevsky and the Search for a Global Ethic, Leonard G. Friesen ranges widely across Dostoevsky's stories, novels, journalism, notebooks, and correspondence to demonstrate how Dostoevsky engaged with ethical issues in his times and how those same issues continue to be relevant to today's ethical debates. Friesen contends that the Russian ethical voice, in particular Dostoevsky's voice, deserves careful consideration in an increasingly global discussion of moral philosophy and the ethical life. Friesen challenges the view that contemporary liberalism (...) provides a religiously neutral foundation for a global ethic. He argues instead that Dostoevsky has much to offer when it comes to the search for a global ethic, an ethic that for Dostoevsky was necessarily grounded in a Christian concept of an active, extravagant, and transcendent love. Friesen also investigates Dostoevsky's response to those who claimed that contemporary European trends, most evident in the rising secularization of nineteenth-century society, provided a more viable foundation for a global ethic than one grounded in the One, whom Doestoevsky called simply "the Russian Christ." Throughout, Friesen captures a sense of the depth and sheer loveliness of Dostoevsky's canon. Dostoevsky was, after all, someone who believed that the ethical life was sublimely beautiful, even as it recklessly embraced suffering and unreasonably forgave others. The book will appeal to both students and scholars of Russian literature and history, comparative ethics, global ethics, and cultural studies, and togeneral readers with an interest in Dostoevsky. "Others have written about Dostoevsky's ethics, but I am not aware of any single-authored, sustained attempt to make the case for Dostoevsky's 'transcendent love' as part of a larger discussion of a global ethic. Moreover, Leonard Friesen presents his case in an engaging and highly accessible form. He believes passionately that Dostoevsky is deeply relevant to the discussion; his commitment rings through the pages and draws the reader in. In this way, his essay makes an original contribution to Dostoevsky studies that will appeal to scholars in a variety of disciplines and to educated lay readers with ethical concerns about the path of modernity, as well as to the many fans of Dostoevsky's work." --Russell Hillier, Providence College. (shrink)

This paper engages Alex Dubilet’s _The Self-Emptying Subject: Kenosis and Immanence, Medieval to Modern_ and his account of immanence and kenosis as exhibited in his reading of Hegel’s concept of _Entäußerung_ [externalization]. Specifically, I focus on the “problematic of desubjectivation” that centers Dubilet’s critique of transcendence and its relationship to subjection and subjectivity. I reconsider the relationship made between this problematic, the ethics of kenosis, and the concept of immanence so as to demonstrate the ways in which Dubilet attempts (...) to depart from transcendence, subjectivity, and their concomitant ethics. In particular, I consider his reading of Hegel’s concept of _Entäußerung_ and its similarities to the Young Hegelians’ understanding of this concept. My reading of Dubilet suggests that while he seeks to depart from transcendence, he reintroduces transcendence through the “problematic of desubjectivation” and its relationship to kenosis. In conclusion, I question the philosophical import of immanence in contemporary critical inquiry and why its conceptualization is often positioned in opposition to transcendence. (shrink)

The idea of immanent transcendence is constitutive for Winch's philosophy of religion and his ethics. Winch's philosophy of religion insists on the ‘immanent’ dimension of religion. His ethics insists on the ‘transcendent’ dimension of ethics. In this sense, both religion and ethics embody a perspective ‘beyond’ this world and yet must have practical consequences in this world. Transcendence without immanence is idle, and immanence without transcendence is empty—this is the kernel of Winch's philosophy of religion and of (...) his ethics. (shrink)

Albinism is a global public health issue but it assumes a peculiar nature in the African continent due, in part, to the social stigma faced by persons with albinism in Africa. I argue that there are two essential reasons for this precarious situation. First, in the African consciousness, albinism is an alterity or otherness. The PWA in Africa is not merely a physical other but also an ontological other in the African community of beings, which provides a hermeneutic for the (...) stigmatising separateness or difference of the PWA. The second reason hinges on a distinction drawn by Jürgen Habermas between the ethical point of view and the moral point of view. While the former consists of the ethos, customs, or idea of the good shared by a group of persons with a shared tradition or way of life, the latter consists of what is good for all and transcends particular traditions or ways of life. Consequently, the African ethical point of view, the ethics of solidarity, justifies within the African worldview the established alterity and, by implication, stigmatization of PWAs. On this view, actions that promote harmony and prevent discord and disequilibrium among accepted beings in the African community are permissible. I further show that unless there is a change in the physical and ontological conception of PWAs and a leap from the ethical point of view to the moral point of view, the negative attitudes toward PWAs will not change. The leap to the moral point of view does not suggest an abandonment of the ethical point of view but only recommends that the two meet halfway in respect for universally accepted norms of human actions. To achieve this, I will show that much needs to be done in the areas of policy formulation, law, health care services, and education. (shrink)

In Judaism Straight Up, Moshe Koppel explores the central differences between traditional societies--including traditional Judaism--and contemporary cosmopolitan ones. He explains everything you always wanted to know about the subtleties of Jewish morality, tradition, and belief, and how these have unfolded to beat cosmopolitanism at its own game: advancing cooperation, fairness, and freedom. Written with incisiveness and droll wit--and a scientific sensibility that draws on economics, game theory, and other disciplines--Judaism Straight Up reveals the secret of Jewish traditionalism's endurance."--Page [4] of (...) cover. (shrink)

The search for an ontological basis of medical practice is questioned from the viewpoint that ontologies are always related to the interpreting person in his situation, and that the definition of medicine includes a certain choice. This choice-character comes into greater play when ethical proposals are made. A foundation of medical ethics on an ontology of the healthy body or the factual medical practice is a naturalistic fallacy. Prior to an ontological basis, the ethical event of responsibility for the suffering (...) and transcendent other (Levinas) is constitutive for medicine. This event with its dimension of infinity of the other can only be ontologized by a totalitarian act. A philosophy of medicine should start with the heteronomy of the other. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the analysis of ontological and epistemological models of the transcendent and transcendental in ancient philosophy, which allows us to understand the genesis and foundations of the main variants of metaphysics in classical thought. In general, constructions of ancient Greek thought are characterized by the understanding of the transcendent as "other" being, the higher sphere of the "cosmos of nature", which has specific spatio-temporal properties, which is outside the immanent world of man. Ontological terms, the Cosmos (...) was subdivided into earthly being, in which a man lives, and being "beyond", inaccessible to a man because of his bodily and vital limitations. In epistemological terms the transcendent was considered incomprehensible for sensory cognition, but accessible for cognition of the speculative, although not in full. The metaphysical model of the transcendental created by antiquity did not provide for the existence of an independent "human cosmos" isolated from the external world. The main task of the transcendental method was to determine the conditions by which it is possible to think of the data of empirical observations. (shrink)

Abstract:Through an intercultural dialogue—Chinese and Western—this article explores the possibility of building cultural diversity and pluralism in philosophy. It focuses, first, on building a dialogue between Levinas' and Zhu Xi's apparent (philosophical) affinity for ethics at the level of meaning of the concept of transcendence in the Neo-Confucian and Levinasian ethical contexts and, second, on uncovering and analyzing the inapparent differences at the level of cultural presuppositions on which this apparent affinity is based. I offer that both Levinas and (...) Zhu Xi distinguish the impulse to care for the other—out of which the human relationship emerges—as rooted not in the ontological self but in an ethical transcendence: the other's face (Levinas) and the human authentic nature as mandate of heaven (Zhu Xi). The article comparatively interprets them and their cultural presuppositions. (shrink)

A slow but steady trend to decline routine immunization has evolved over the past few decades, despite its pivotal role in staving off life-threatening communicable diseases. Religious beliefs are among the reasons given for exemptions. In the context of an overview of various religious approaches to this issue, this article addresses the Jewish religious obligation to immunize. The latter is nested in the more general obligation to take responsibility for one’s health as it is essential to living a morally productive (...) life. Furthermore, the individual’s responsibility extends to supporting communal health by contributing to herd immunity. Judaism embraces evidence-based information regarding immunization safety and efficacy and holds the resulting professional guidelines to be religiously binding. From a Jewish perspective, government bodies need to weigh respect for individual autonomy to refrain from immunization against preserving public safety, such that waiving autonomy should be reserved for immediately life-threatening situations. Nurses’ knowledge and understanding of the Jewish legal approach as explicated in this article and those of other religions in which similar principles apply (such as Islam and Christianity) can enrich their awareness of how revering God can go hand in hand with an obligation to prevent illness for the self and the community by immunizing. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this article, we argue that it is possible to approach teaching from a fully affirmative perspective: as an educational practice that has its own internal logic and intrinsic value. By analysing a fragment from one of the Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts presented in this article as a teaching event, we show that when starting from an empirical example of teaching it is possible to distinguish principles and gestures that testify to an ontological dimension of teaching. This is possible, (...) however, only when a particular reading of this empirical material is applied. We call this an immanent reading, as opposed to a transcendent reading. It should be clear that this kind of inquiry we briefly demonstrate here is exactly a post-critical attempt to re-establish our affirmative relation with one of the most devalued, repressed, and neglected educational practice, namely teaching. (shrink)

Religion, defined as ‘the idea of a state that transcends ourselves and our world and the working out of the consequences of that idea’, may influence the ethical thinking of scientists and engineers in two ways. The first is at the level of the individual and how personal beliefs affect the choice of research, design or development projects, relationships with other researchers and the understandings of the consequences of research on other aspects of life. The second level is that of (...) the social and cultural setting in which scientists and engineers work; how society decides which research to sponsor, how to apply the results of scientific discovery and which technology it chooses to develop and for what purposes. In neither of these areas is religious belief a necessary condition for scientists and engineers to pursue one course of action rather than another. The existence of religious belief within the individual and society is, though, part of the ethical framework in which scientist and engineers work and therefore something to which attention should be paid. Religion provides a particular perspective on what should be. Conversely science and technology provide information on the nature of the person and the universe in which we live, which must be taken into account when theologians and religious moralists apply their ethical norms and principles. (shrink)

Identifies immanence as the original impetus and the driving force behind Deleuze's philosophy In 5 chapters dealing with the status of thought itself, ontology, logic, ethics and aesthetics, de Beistegui reveals how immanence is realised in each of these classical domains of philosophy. Ultimately, he argues, immanence is an infinite task, and transcendence the opposition with which philosophy will always need to reckon.