Each chapter in Christianity and Political Philosophy addresses a philosophical problem generated by history. Frederick D. Wilhelmsen discusses the limits of natural law; Cicero and the politics of the public orthodoxy; the problem of political power and the forces of darkness; Sir John Fortescue and the English tradition; Donoso Cortes and the meaning of political power; the natural law tradition and the American political experience; Eric Voegelin and the Christian tradition; and Jaffa, the School of Strauss, and the (...) Christian tradition. Wilhelmsen is convinced that mainstream philosophy's suppression of the Christian experience, or its reduction of Christianity to myths, deprives both Christianity and philosophy. He argues that Christianity opened up an entirely new range of philosophical questions and speculation that today are part and parcel of the intellectual tradition of the West. Wilhelmsen remains relevant because political philosophy in America today is following the historic cycle of political philosophy's importance: as things get worse for the nation because it is internally riven by ideological and spiritual conflicts, there is a greater need for the political philosopher to raise and explore profound questions and reassert forgotten truths about man and society, the soul and God, and good and evil, as well as the ground of political order. This is the latest book in Transaction's esteemed Library of Conservative Thought series. (shrink)

This volume comprises papers presented at a conference marking the 50th anniversary of Joachim Wach's death, and the centennial of Mircea Eliade's birth.

Focusing on the close connection between Friedrich Nietzsche's historical thought and the discourse of German historicism in the second half of the nineteenth century, this article argues in a thick contextual reading that Nietzsche's second VomNutzenundNachtheilderHistoriefürdasLeben(1874), needs to be understood as a reflection on the political dimension of historical consciousness, outlining what I shall term a In contrast to the standard emphasis on Nietzsche's presumed aestheticism, he is shown to react to rather specific developments within the contemporary intellectual context, such (...) as the establishment of specific historical foundation myths for a new German nation state, exemplified by the public monuments and commemorations of the 1870s, the effect of such foundation myths on the political imagination of historical scholarship, and the intellectual antagonism between Basel's and the German nation state. (shrink)

This book explores Friedrich Nietzsche's understanding of modern political culture and his position in the history of modern political thought. Surveying Nietzsche's entire intellectual career from his years as a student in Bonn and Leipzig during the 1860s to his genealogical project of the 1880s, Christian Emden contributes to a historically informed discussion of Nietzsche's response to the political predicaments of modernity, and sheds new light on the intellectual and political culture in Germany as the ideals of the Enlightenment gave (...) way to the demands of the modern nation state. This is a distinguished addition to the series of Ideas in Context, and a major reassessment of a philosopher and aphorist whose stature among post-enlightenment European thinkers is now almost unrivalled. (shrink)

In this book, David Lindenfeld proposes a new dimension to the study of world history. Here, he explores the global expansion of Christianity since 1500 from the perspectives of the indigenous people who were affected by it, and helped change it, giving them active agency. Integrating the study of religion into world history, his volume surveys indigenous experience in colonial Latin America, Native North America, Africa and the African diaspora, the Middle East, India, East Asia, and the Pacific. Lindenfeld (...) demonstrates how religion is closely interwoven with political, economic, and social history. Wide-ranging in scope, and offering a synoptic perspective of our interconnected world, Lindenfeld combines in-depth analysis of individual regions with comprehensive global coverage. He also provides a new vocabulary, with a spectrum ranging from resistance to acceptance and commitment to Christianity, that articulates the range and complexity of the indigenous conversion experience. Lindenfeld's cross-cultural reflections provide a compelling alternative to the Western narrative of progressive development. (shrink)

Even before trust became a buzzword, theoretical developments were made, which have instigated the development of two forms of trust which are described as personal trust and system trust/confidence. However, this distinction remained rather secondary in the overall literature. There is an overall lack on the historical developments of these forms of trust, their internal logic and how they interlink, overlap, or work against each other. The paper aims to advance these three aspects: first through a historical overview of the (...) semantic of this distinction, followed by a theoretical reconstruction of the historical material and third by demonstrating how these theoretical concepts can be applied to political crises (Revolutions of 1989), thus revealing their logic and mutual interlocking. (shrink)

This book examines doping in Germany, with primary attention given to West Germany, from 1950 to the present, including what societal, cultural, and institutional pressures arose after WWII to bring about such prevalence of doping in the country.

This essay questions the place of other-than-human animals in Levinas’s thought. After detailing how animals and animality figure in Levinas’s work, it is claimed that his ethical exclusion of animals is due to a conception of animals as wholly accountable for in terms of species-being, wholly within “naturalhistory.” It is then suggested that Levinas’s position is ill-founded, and at odds with his claims about the importance of suffering and the vulnerable body in the encounter with the other. The essay concludes (...) by arguing that speaking of other-than-human animal “faces” is not necessarily an unduly anthropocentricextension of thinking-of-the-other. (shrink)

This collection provides the first in-depth introduction to the theory of the religious imagination put forward by renowned philosopher Douglas Hedley, from his earliest essays to his principal writings. Featuring Hedley's inaugural lecture delivered at Cambridge University in 2018, the book sheds light on his robust concept of religious imagination as the chief power of the soul's knowledge of the Divine and reveals its importance in contemporary metaphysics, ethics and politics. Chapters trace the development of the religious imagination in (...) Christian Platonism from Late Antiquity to British Romanticism, drawing on Origen, Henry More and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, before providing a survey of alternative contemporary versions of the concept as outlined by Karl Rahner, René Girard and William P. Alston, as well as within Indian philosophy. By bringing Christian Platonist thought into dialogue with contemporary philosophy and theology, the volume systematically reveals the relevance of Hedley's work to current debates in religious epistemology and metaphysics. It offers a comprehensive appraisal of the historical contribution of imagination to religious understanding and, as such, will be of great interest to philosophers, theologians and historians alike. (shrink)

The Political Crisis and Christian Ethics addresses themes in political philosophy in the context of a crisis in democracy after the denial of the 2020 election by the Republican candidate for president. The refusal to accept the results of the election divided the electorate and drove the president's followers to fail in their attempted coup attempt in January of 2020. Democracy is defended in Reinhold Niebuhr's writing on politics and in Barack Obama's use of the theologian's thought. It is (...) developed further in the political theory of Paul Tillich. The themes of just peacemaking are reviewed in Paul Tillich's critique of John Foster Dulles' work and in the author's critique of just peacemaking in the work of Glen Stassen. Domestically the issues of race, inequality, ecology, and healthcare are addressed from the perspective of prophetic realism. The book concludes in terms of Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy of education and religion and a vision of the good president. In summary, The Political Crisis and Christian Ethics is a volume of American, Christian political theory in a period of overcoming the trauma of 2016 with Christian ethics and political philosophy. (shrink)

Articles on the history of Assamese Sikhs.

Edited by two leading scholars of the history of early modern skepticism, this volume collects thirteen essays from a variety of North and South American as well as European authors. Following the groundbreaking work of Richard H. Popkin and others such as Richard A. Watson, José Maia Neto, and James Force, much has been made about skepticism in relation to early modern natural sciences and to religion. Curiously little, however, addresses skepticism and early modern politics. This volume works to (...) fill that lacuna and takes another step along the path on which Laursen embarked in his The Politics of Skepticism and in the cascade of publications following it. The volume adds complexity and scope, too... (shrink)

This article makes two key claims in succession. First of all, Kant’s own religious hope is significantly and studiedly distanced from the traditions of Christianity that he would have received, in ways that have not yet been fully, or widely, appreciated. Kant makes an ideal moral community the object of our religious hopes, and not the transcendent God of the tradition. Secondly, Kant nonetheless has a notion of transcendence at play, but in a strikingly different key to traditional (...) class='Hi'>Christianity. Both concepts of transcendence, the Christian and the Kantian, deflate, in their own distinctive ways, our hopes for politics and history, in a way that can unsettle the certainties, and vanities, of both the traditional theologian and the secular Rawlsian. The Christian hope is not the same as Kant’s religious hope, which is distinct, in origin, depth and ambition from his more limited hope for politics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 23 (2003) 151-155 [Access article in PDF] Buddhism and Christianity: A Multicultural History of their Dialogue. By Whalen Lai and Michael von Bruck. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2001. xiv + 265 pp. This book is an abridged translation of Buddhismus und Christentum: Geschichte, Konfrontation, Dialog, first published in 1997 by Verlag C. H. Beck in Munich. I do not know how much has been lost in the (...) abridgement, but this English version remains a treasure trove that deserves to be read and digested by everyone engaged in Buddhist-Christian dialogue.From the English title, I expected a somewhat dry work of intellectual history, summarizing dated doctrinal debates. This book provides much more than that. Most valuable is its emphasis on the historical and cultural context of Buddhist-Christian encounters, especially the poisonous legacy of Western colonialism (which still survives today as economic neocolonialism). These quite varied contexts have usually been decisive for the success or failure of the encounter, and as this nuanced but frank study shows, the failures have been at least as notable as the successes. Here, too, we must remember the past if we want to do more than keep repeating it. As well as identifying specific problems, there is a perceptive analysis of the obstacles to openness and dialogue in each case.The penultimate chapter includes a discussion of our Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies, its conferences, and this journal. As a relative newcomer to the conversations, I found this particular example of contextualizing fascinating. In just the few conferences I have been able to attend, there have been so many facets to the dialogue that it has been difficult to gain a sense of the whole, to understand how the main threads have developed and interwoven. How well do we remember what has already been discussed, and often agreed upon? It is important that we do not just keep repeating ourselves, and I know of no other book that conveys the historical dimension of the dialogue so well. The silent, contemplative aspects of the encounter are also addressed: cross-cultural meditation groups, Christian Zen teachers, and visits to each other's monastic centers.A useful foreword by Hans Kung reviews his own contributions, including his [End Page 151] paradigm analysis of six different "general constellations" found in the Christian tradition (the original Jewish-apocalyptic paradigm, the ancient ecumenical-Hellenistic paradigm, the medieval Roman Catholic paradigm, the Reformation Protestant-evangelical paradigm, the modernist progress-oriented paradigm, and now the postmodern ecumenical paradigm) and six other constellations in the Buddhist tradition (Gautama's original paradigm, the Theravada- sravakayana paradigm, the Mahayana paradigm, the tantric Vajrayana paradigm, a defensive modernist paradigm, and most recently an emerging postmodernist paradigm), with the implication that we need to be careful to clarify which of the paradigms we are comparing.Inevitably, the focus is limited: India and Sri Lanka are discussed at length, but not southeast Asia; China and Japan, but not Korea; Germany, but not the rest of Europe. The Indian chapter is mostly about Tibetans in exile. I was intrigued by the generation gap between older, conservative Tibetan monks and more freethinking younger ones. Otherwise, the Indian dialogue seems not to have been as intensive as many other places in Asia, which makes sense since there are relatively few Buddhists in India today. Given the mass conversions of Dalits, the social context has usually been the emancipation of disadvantaged social groups, and is further complicated now by the increasing influence of neo-Hindu political movements, which makes all interreligious exchange more sensitive.The Sri Lankan dialogue, perhaps more than any other, has been preoccupied with the heritage of colonialism. Sinhalese take pride in being citizens of the only country to have shaken off colonial rule with a successful Buddhist revolution, which reversed the power relationship between the two religions. Evidently most Sinhala Buddhists, including much of the sangha, accept the need to defend Buddhism and Buddhist culture militarily, if necessary. The ruling political class that succeeded the British, a largely Buddhist- and Marxist-inspired elite, opted for constructing a national identity... (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the genuinely philosophical engagement with the idea of Europe twentieth century philosophy. Here, especially phenomenology has developed a distinct tradition of conceiving Europe not as a geographical and political entity but rather as a ‘spiritual shape.’ Husserl, as the originator of this thought, traces this spiritual Europe back to Ancient Greece of the 7/6 century B.C. in which an unprecedented ‘theoretical attitude’ towards the world originated. Hence, Europe is conceived as a project of reason, of pure rationality (...) while at the same time leaving out the constitutive dimension of religion. Furthermore, this non-historical philosophical genealogy proves itself to be an arbitrary but intentional genealogy whose intentions have to be put into critical reconsideration. In this article, I will introduce Patočka and Zambrano as important critiques of Husserl’s genealogy, or even potentially violent mono-genealogy, as Derrida has emphasized. Following Foucault, it is the aim of this article to put into question the myth of a single historical-political origin of Europe’s spiritual heritage and furthermore to pay attention to the transformations and conflictual relations between Europe’s different forms of reason and religion. (shrink)

We invite systematic consideration of the metaphors of cycles and circulation as a long-term theme in the history of the life and environmental sciences and medicine. Ubiquitous in ancient religious and philosophical traditions, especially in representing the seasons and the motions of celestial bodies, circles once symbolized perfection. Over the centuries cyclic images in western medicine, natural philosophy, natural history and eventually biology gained independence from cosmology and theology and came to depend less on strictly circular forms. As potent ‘canonical (...) icons’, cycles also interacted with representations of linear and irreversible change, including arrows, arcs, scales, series and trees, as in theories of the Earth and of evolution. In modern times life cycles and reproductive cycles have often been held to characterize life, in some cases especially female life, while human efforts selectively to foster and disrupt these cycles have harnessed their productivity in medicine and agriculture. But strong cyclic metaphors have continued to link physiology and climatology, medicine and economics, and biology and manufacturing, notably through the relations between land, food and population. From the grand nineteenth-century transformations of matter to systems ecology, the circulation of molecules through organic and inorganic compartments has posed the problem of maintaining identity in the face of flux and highlights the seductive ability of cyclic schemes to imply closure where no original state was in fact restored. More concerted attention to cycles and circulation will enrich analyses of the power of metaphors to naturalize understandings of life and their shaping by practical interests and political imaginations. (shrink)

In A History of Philosophy in the Twentieth Century , Christian Delacampagne reviews the discipline's divergent and dramatic course and shows that its greatest figures, even the most unworldly among them, were deeply affected by events of their time. From Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose famous Tractatus was actually composed in the trenches during World War I, to Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger -- one who found himself barred from public life with Hitler's coming to power, the other a member of the (...) Nazi party who later refused to repudiate German war crimes. From Bertrand Russell, whose lifelong pacifism led him to turn from logic and mathematics to social and moral questions, and Jean-Paul Sartre, who made philosophy an occasion for direct and personal political engagement, to Rudolf Carnap, a committed socialist, and Karl Popper, a resolute opponent of Communism. From the Vienna Circle and the Frankfurt School to the contemporary work of philosophers as variously minded as Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, and Hilary Putnam. The thinking of these philosophers, and scores of others, cannot be understood without being placed in the context of the times in which they lived. (shrink)

What is the value of history to philosophy? Hasok Chang proposes that when a philosophical model runs into a problem, it is likely that its underlying historical assumption that informs and upholds such model, requires a revisit, if not, a major overhaul. A reconstruction of history could contribute to a new way of approaching philosophical problems. Chang through a series of articles gives us a detailed account of the debate over the nature of combustion, phlogiston and fixed air in the (...) late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which shed light on operationalism, realism, natural kinds, pragmatism, epistemic iteration, incommensurability, epistemic pluralism, and other philosophcical issues in the realm of HPS. This article applied his interdisciplinary approach to philosophy and history, to the three prevalent models concerning the relation between Christianity and philosophy. I argue that Integration Model, Disjunction Model, and Conflict Model, is not clear-cut but interwoven in the thoughts of early church fathers, many of whom hold onto paradoxical stances. I suggest that it is better to measure a person’s commitment to Christianity and philosophy on a spectrum with philosophy on one side while Christianity the other. A person’s degrees of committment move back and forth on the spectrum contingent upon the semantic, political and social contexts within which they are speaking, as will be shown in the case of two early church fathers, Lactantius and Eusebius. (shrink)

Meier shows how the structure of Greek communal life gave individuals a civic role and discusses a crucial reform that institutionalized the idea of equality ...

This book provides theoretical tools for evaluating the soundness of arguments in the context of legal argumentation. It deals with a number of general argument types and their particular use in legal argumentation. It provides detailed analyses of argument from authority, argument ad hominem, argument from ignorance, slippery slope argument and other general argument types. Each of these argument types can be used to construct arguments that are sound as well as arguments that are unsound. To evaluate an argument correctly (...) one must be able to distinguish the sound instances of a certain argument type from its unsound instances. This book promotes the development of theoretical tools for this task. (shrink)

The Politics of the Texbook analyzes the factors that shape production, distribution and reception of school texts through original essays which emphasize the double-edged quality of textbooks. Textbooks are viewed as systems of moral regulation in the struggle of powerful groups to build political and cultural accord. They are also regarded as the site of popular resistance around discloding the interest underlying schoolknowledge and incorporating alternative traditions.

This provocative work provides a radical reassessment of the emergence and nature of Christian sexual morality, the dominant moral paradigm in Western society since late antiquity. While many scholars, including Michel Foucault, have found the basis of early Christian sexual restrictions in Greek ethics and political philosophy, Kathy L. Gaca demonstrates on compelling new grounds that it is misguided to regard Greek ethics and political theory—with their proposed reforms of eroticism, the family, and civic order—as the foundation of Christian sexual (...) austerity. Rather, in this thoroughly informed and wide-ranging study, Gaca shows that early Christian goals to eradicate fornication were derived from the sexual rules and poetic norms of the Septuagint, or Greek Bible, and that early Christian writers adapted these rules and norms in ways that reveal fascinating insights into the distinctive and largely non-philosophical character of Christian sexual morality. Writing with an authoritative command of both Greek philosophy and early Christian writings, Gaca investigates Plato, the Stoics, the Pythagoreans, Philo of Alexandria, the apostle Paul, and the patristic Christians Clement of Alexandria, Tatian, and Epiphanes, freshly elucidating their ideas on sexual reform with precision, depth, and originality. Early Christian writers, she demonstrates, transformed all that they borrowed from Greek ethics and political philosophy to launch innovative programs against fornication that were inimical to Greek cultural mores, popular and philosophical alike. The Septuagint's mandate to worship the Lord alone among all gods led to a Christian program to revolutionize Gentile sexual practices, only for early Christians to find this virtually impossible to carry out without going to extremes of sexual renunciation. Knowledgeable and wide-ranging, this work of intellectual history and ethics cogently demonstrates why early Christian sexual restrictions took such repressive ascetic forms, and casts sobering light on what Christian sexual morality has meant for religious pluralism in Western culture, especially among women as its bearers. (shrink)

Benjamin Constant's On Religion was a major effort to include religion within liberal political thought, insisting on the possibility of religious progress and perfectibility. It was also a major critique of Catholicism and of clericalism in any form. And it was one of the most wide-ranging comparative studies of religion since it purported to cover all religions worldwide before Christianity. Constant worked on it for most of his adult life, more than 40 years. This article traces the rise of (...) the language of progress and perfectibility in Constant's milieu, finding roots in Rousseau, Scottish thinkers, Germans and Swiss such as Madame de Staël, Condorcet, William Godwin, and others. He also sprinkled some of his ideas about progress and perfectibility in his wide-ranging political writings. But it was in On Religion that he went into the idea of progress and perfectibility in depth, finding both a universal human need for religion and religious progress in every religion and over time. It may be true that he underestimated the possibility of regress and failure in human development, but nevertheless this work stands as a monument to liberal confidence in a better future. (shrink)

As one of the most important concepts in Islamic political history and thought, the caliphate has received ample attention in recent years. Thanks to Hugh Kenne.

This is an essay about language, thought, and culture in general, and about Ancient Greek and Classical Chinese in particular. It is about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which says that language influences the mind, and applies this hypothesis to Greek and Chinese. It is also an essay in comparative philosophy as well as a contribution to the history of ideas. From the language side, I rely on the nineteenth-century German linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt, and from the culture side on the contemporary (...) French sinologist François Jullien. Combining their ideas, I give substance to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and explain some of Jullien's claims about the historical and political developments of Chinese culture. The central .. (shrink)

The debate about secularization in recent decades has challenged long-held assumptions about Western modernity and the purported decline of religion in modern societies. However, the impact of this criticism on the idea of history has so far not received as much attention as it deserves. Jayne Svenungsson’s analysis of the influence of biblical motives on contemporary political theology illustrates one way in which the concept of history might be rethought in the wake of the crisis of the secularization thesis. In (...) dialogue with Karl Löwith’s classical argument that modern philosophy of history and the idea of historical progress are secularized versions of Christian eschatology, she argues that the prophetic vision of history as a struggle for a justice that supersedes every current law or moral system is a viable and promising alternative that ought to be considered in contemporary discussions of politics and history. Svenungsson’s analysis thus amounts to what one might call a postsecular challenge to a secular historical discourse. (shrink)

There can be little doubt that the “will to power” remains one of Nietzsche’s most controversial philosophical concepts. Leaving aside its colorful and controversial political history in the first half of the twentieth century, the will to power poses considerable problems for any serious reconstruction of Nietzsche’s project. This is particularly the case for analytic reconstructions, which view Nietzsche’s philosophical naturalism largely through the lens of metaethical concerns that are themselves grounded in a psychological reading of will, affect, value, or (...) ressentiment.1 The will to power, though, defies interpretations that are schooled in contemporary philosophy of mind, or cognitive psychology. Even.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Ramsey: Idealist and Pragmatic Christians on Politics, Philosophy, Religion, and WarBradley BurroughsReinhold Niebuhr and Paul Ramsey: Idealist and Pragmatic Christians on Politics, Philosophy, Religion, and War Kevin Carnahan Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2010. 302 pp. $75.00.In a time when the “war on terror” and the polarization of American political culture have raised acute questions about politics, war, and the use of (...) power, Kevin Carnahan believes ethicists could benefit from the legacies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Ramsey. During a similarly vexed period, Niebuhr and Ramsey found themselves at odds over the morality of the Vietnam War. Carnahan’s project seeks to elucidate the underlying sources of this disagreement, examining in turn how each thinker construes the task of moral theology, the nature of political society, and the moral status of war. Throughout these treatments, Carnahan illustrates how Niebuhr and Ramsey elaborated “overlapping but divergent” positions profoundly influenced by their respective encounters with pragmatism and idealism.Even as he shows how Niebuhr modified the pragmatist inheritance and Ramsey the idealist, Carnahan highlights how both were shaped especially by the way in which these traditions sought to counter specific moral dangers. For pragmatists, the key danger lay in the kind of moral fanaticism that blithely assumes its own righteousness. Sensitized to this threat, Niebuhr articulated a moral theology centered upon an understanding of love as an ideal that is always relevant yet never fully realizable in history, a construal that subverts all pretensions to righteousness. Idealism, on the other hand, sets itself against the danger of atomistic individualism, which Ramsey opposed by depicting social institutions in their essential forms as “‘garments of skin’... with which God... clothed naked human relations” (129) and by characterizing love as fundamentally a matter of upholding the covenants implied in such institutions. Ultimately, Niebuhr’s opposition to fanaticism predisposed him to focus upon the idolatries at play in political society and war and allowed him rather early on to descry the pretentiousness of the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, Ramsey’s thought included a presumption in favor of supporting the policies developed by social and political leaders that led him to defend American intervention in Vietnam until sometime around 1973. [End Page 218]The book’s expository work is generally surefooted and illuminative, although it at times falls into redundancy, baldly reiterating its thesis. Nonetheless, it complements existing scholarship on Niebuhr and Ramsey with an investigation of the philosophical premises of their ethical thought that each was eager to conceal. Such work will benefit scholars of Niebuhr and Ramsey as well as advanced students seeking to grasp the general architecture of their thought. Moreover, many will find Carnahan’s interpretations of Niebuhr and Ramsey impressive. For example, Carnahan portrays Niebuhr as a more Barthian and ecclessially minded thinker than most accounts. Although Carnahan understandably does not treat such indictments in detail, his rendering undercuts charges leveled by many of Niebuhr’s critics, including Bennett, Yoder, and Hauerwas. Unfortunately, though, Carnahan’s arguments on some of these disputed points are predicated upon a relatively narrow selection of essays. Still, the book unsettles assumptions and suggests further possibilities for inquiry.In addition to his expository work, Carnahan also makes a further contribution as he subjects both Niebuhr and Ramsey to constructive criticism that exposes—and identifies ways of reinforcing—some of the weaknesses of pragmatism and idealism. Eschewing a synthesis, Carnahan instead offers a mutually constructive dialogue capable of helping thinkers of both stripes think through the issues that confront contemporary America. Even if he does not elaborate on a more precise application of his insights to contemporary politics, he offers advice helpful to pragmatists and idealists alike and leaves many of us hoping that he has more to say on such matters. [End Page 219]Bradley BurroughsEmory UniversityCopyright © 2012 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Today's social and political climate often pits conservative or traditional Christianity against "progressive" Christianity. But what is progressive Christianity? What is a progressive Christian? What is a progressive church? Christianity in Blue answers these questions by drawing from biblical scholarship, Christian history, theology, popular culture, philosophy, and cultural anthropology. Kaden shows how socially liberal values and progressive attitudes can be the fruits of taking seriously both the Bible and Christian tradition. But rather than treating these sources (...) as static authorities and the final word on every subject, Kaden argues that they are places to start one's exploration of how to be a Christian in the world. Being a progressive Christian is an ethical exhortation to "uplift human personality," as Martin Luther King Jr. once said. This exhortation structures how progressive Christians receive, interpret, and apply the Bible and Christian tradition to daily life. A robust tradition provides an anchor to avoid the illiberal trends in contemporary society, and a commitment to uplifting human personality provides a check against dehumanizing uses of Scripture and tradition. Christianity in Blue will help both progressive and conservative Christians better understand the importance of the Bible, theology, history, and philosophy for building a loving church for everyone. (shrink)

Consciousness and Politics begins with an analysis of the problem of the historicity of truth as it was formulated shortly before Voegelin abandoned his eight-volume History of Political Ideas. The analysis then follows a more or less chronological path, discussing the arguments developed in The New Science of Politics, Voegelin's most famous book, the differentiation of consciousness and the problems of myth and nature as presented in the early volumes of Order and History. Starting in the 1960s, Voegelin (...) began a lengthy argument in several volumes that resumed his concern with the philosophy of consciousness, which he had outlined in his early writings, and its connection to what we conventionally call philosophy of history. Voegelin's late and often difficult essays, lectures, and the final volume of Order and History, many scholars have noticed, emphasize the meditative origins of his political science and, more broadly, of philosophy. The concluding chapters analyze this subject-matter and a perennial question that so many of Voegelin's readers have raised: what is the relation of his political science or philosophy to Christianity? (shrink)

How did meat emerge to become such an important feature in Western society? In both popular and academic literatures, biophysical and political-economic factors are often cited as the reason for meat’s preeminent status. In this paper, we perform a comprehensive investigation of these claims by reviewing the available evidence on the political-economic and biophysical features of meat over the long arc of Western history. We specifically focus on nine critical epochs: the Paleolithic, early to late Neolithic, antiquity, ancient Israel and (...) early Christian societies, medieval Europe, early modern Europe, colonial America, the American frontier, and the modern industrial era. We find that except under conditions of environmental scarcity, the meaning and value of meat cannot be attributed to intrinsic biophysical value or to the political-economic actors who materially benefit from it. Rather, meat’s status reflects the myriad cultural contexts in which it is socially constructed in people’s everyday lives, particularly with respect to religious, gender, communal, racial, national, and class identity. By deconstructing the normalized/naturalized materialist assumptions circling around meat consumption, this paper clears a space for a more nuanced appreciation of the role that culture has played in the legitimation of meat, and by extension, the possibility of change. (shrink)

This book focuses on the question, what is the relationship between Christianity and politics? The author argues that the De Regno of Thomas Aquinas offers an answer; discusses Aquinas's themes in the history of Christian political thought.

Rudolf Carnap’s formative years as a philosopher were his time in Jena where he studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy, among others, with Gottlob Frege, the neo-Kantian Bruno Bauch, and Herman Nohl, a pupil of Wilhelm Dilthey.2 Whereas both the influence of Frege and of the neo-Kantians is quite well known,3 the importance of the Dilthey school for Carnap’s intellectual development was recently highlighted by scholars, such as Gottfried Gabriel and Hans-Joachim Dahms.4 Although Carnap himself was interested mainly in the problems (...) of logic and the philosophy of the natural sciences, the community in which he worked until he went to Vienna in 1926 was neither a community of neo-Kantian philosophers nor of logicians or philosophers of the natural sciences but a community of members of the Dilthey school that were interested in history of philosophy ,5 pedagogic ,6 aesthetics ,7 and sociology .8 Carnap and his friends were all members of the so-called Seracircle, a group of young people that met frequently in Jena and, between 1919 and 1926, also in Carnap’s home in Buchenbach near Freiburg.9 The first version of the Aufbau was written in close connection with this group of young people that were interested in a reform of the whole society, including arts, politics, sciences, and everyday life. In Carnap’s Werkstatt in Buchenbach, the Aufbau and at least two more manifestos of a more or less philosophical nature were written: Franz Roh’s “Nach-Expressionismus” and Wilhelm Flitner’s “Laienbildung.”10 Given these historical facts, we must conclude that the Aufbau is the product of an intellectual enterprise that developed in close connection with the Dilthey school, but in which Frege and the neo-Kantians seem to have played only a small role. (shrink)

This book presents an analysis of the institutional development of selected social science and humanities disciplines in Argentina, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Where most narratives of a scholarly past are presented as a succession of ‘ideas,’ research results and theories, this collection highlights the structural shifts in the systems of higher education, as well as institutions of research and innovation within which these disciplines have developed. This institutional perspective will facilitate systematic comparisons between (...) developments in various disciplines and countries. Across eight country studies the book reveals remarkably different dynamics of disciplinary growth between countries, as well as important interdisciplinary differences within countries. In addition, instances of institutional contractions and downturns and veritable breaks of continuity under authoritarian political regimes can be observed, which are almost totally absent from narratives of individual disciplinary histories. This important work will provide a valuable resource to scholars of disciplinary history, the history of ideas, the sociology of education and of scientific knowledge. (shrink)

The Left is scientific, rational, paradigmatic; its concern is with the networks of relationships within which all things are located and through which all things have their significance. The Right is aesthetic, emotional. It attempts to understand in terms of some concrete specific, an archetype. Hybrids of these two, such as Christianity, Communism, and Fascism, mix paradigm and archetype and are dangerous. With the reification of form and idolatry of image, inhuman criteria of reality are automatically set up and (...) give license to idealists and fanatics to ignore the integrity of individual persons in the name of those theories and images. Countervailing factors can be swept away. Human events stand to one another both as parts and wholes; historians need to recognize events as simultaneously episodes and narratives. Paradigms and archetypes are half-truths only and deny the experiential openness that is history. A mysticism of persons would defuse and absorb the Left and Right while transcending them, putting to the fore instead the diversity and novelty of history. (shrink)

This article argues that theological pacifism is best evaluated when situated in a network of practices, beliefs and biblical reading strategies that support a critique of Empire, and when mapped onto this world open up a space for living that is non-territorial and non-sacrificial, the grammar of which is governed by a political understanding of love.

Hugo Drochon's Nietzsche's Great Politics is a well-written and well-argued account of Nietzsche's political vision that presents itself squarely within the tradition of Cambridge School intellectual history. As such, Drochon explicitly rejects interpretations of Nietzsche's political thought that start from the premise of normative democratic theory, but he also fully and rightly rejects any attempt to read Nietzsche's political ideas through the lens of his appropriation by the Nazi regime. Instead, Drochon's aim is to situate Nietzsche in the context (...) of the nineteenth century, especially Imperial Germany, and he is correct in pointing out that the formative periods in Nietzsche's intellectual development roughly... (shrink)

We can hardly know for certain how strongly a scholarly discipline like history is able to affect politics and society, popular views and morals. Whatever its impact, it's influence also varies from epoch to epoch. During a few decades of the nineteenth century, historians were overwhelmed by so many questions and by such high expectations that there existed a large public space for them that they merely had to occupy. At other times, they have had to conquer this space (...) first if they wanted to gain continued attention.To be sure, a differentiation has to be introduced: any society has particular interests, e.g., in parts of its more recent past or in events that society sees as having something like a “mythical quality” about then, events that represent a major divide, that are deeply imprinted on that society's memory, that have attained a special role through tradition. There is, of course, always a space commanding wider public attention for these aspects. However, they are no more than small specks on the large canvas of history. (shrink)

Endeavours to map out a piece of the intellectual history of this century which once almost faded from memory. In 1941 William Temple, then Archbishop of York, called for a Christian social philosophy and in so doing voiced a concern that had been gathering momentum all through the 30s, sharpened by the challenge of authoritarian regimes, left and right, and had formed the focus of the Oxford Conference of Church, Community and State in 1937.

Our methods of research, duly elaborated hereafter, would benefit from being applied to the realm of the East. For that matter, the examination of Syriac, Armenian, Coptic or Arabic manuscripts does not differ in the least from that of a Greek or Latin manuscript. The rules developed by classical philologists are just as valid for the study of the Maxims of Phtahhotep and the Precepts of Kagemeni…Alphonse Dain (1975), Les Manuscrits (Paris, Les Belles Lettres)One of the objects of a comparative (...) history of the scholarly practices in the West, the Far East, the Arab world and classical antiquity is the role of libraries in the constitution, transmission and transformations of the great textual corpora. To the institutional and social aspects of the politics of social memory should be added the range of intellectual and technical practices which have as their aim the conservation of this inheritance: material conservation and transmission - copying texts, restoring them, transferring them from one medium, one script and one language to another - but also work on the literal level and the meaning, the content and the form. (shrink)

The mass theory of the Austrian novelist and philosopher Hermann Broch has been virtually ignored in social theory. However, the recent theoretical interest in crowds makes it pertinent to scrutinize this part of his work. This article presents and examines the fundamental architecture of Broch's Massenwahntheorie, its historical context and how it may contribute to contemporary social theory. Specifically, Broch's insistence on the irrational dimensions of human behaviour is analysed as well as his emphasis on psychological anxiety in modern society. (...) It is argued that both aspects may point beyond the specific context of his writings and illuminate important general aspects of social and political life. (shrink)