Les études qui suivent abordent, de différents points de vue, les matériaux qui ont servi à l’élaboration du système spinoziste. Spinoza est, certes, un auteur qui cite peu ses prédécesseurs, sauf en quelques points névralgiques ; et quand il le fait, c’est souvent pour décrire un mouvement de pensée qui lui semble caractéristique plutôt que pour discuter avec un auteur précis. Les quelques exceptions (les stoïciens, Maïmonide, Descartes) confirment la règle : la critique singulière, accroché...

continent. 1.2 (2011): 78-91. This article consists of three parts. First, I will review the major themes of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude . Since some of my readers will have read this book and others not, I will try to strike a balance between clear summary and fresh critique. Second, I discuss an unpublished book by Meillassoux unfamiliar to all readers of this article, except those scant few that may have gone digging in the microfilm archives of the École (...) normale supérieure. The book in question is Meillassoux’s revised doctoral dissertation L’Inexistence divine (or The Divine Inexistence ), with its seemingly bizarre vision of a God who does not yet exist but might exist in the future. Without literally accepting this view, I will claim that it is philosophically interesting in ways that even a hardened sceptic might be able to appreciate. Third and finally, I will speculate on the possible future of Meillassoux’s speculative materialism itself. And here I mean its future development not by Meillassoux, but by those readers who might be inspired by his book. Plato could never have predicted the emergence of Aristotle’s philosophy, despite the obvious debt of the latter to the former. Nor could Descartes have predicted Spinoza and Leibniz, nor Kant the German Idealists, and neither could Husserl in 1901 have foreseen the later emergence of Heidegger. How are the works of interesting philosophers transformed by later thinkers of comparable importance? While it may seem that there are countless ways to do this, I think there are only two basic ways in which this happens: you can radicalize your predecessors, or you can reverse them. I will close this article with a few words about these two methods, and try to imagine how Meillassoux might be radicalized or reversed by some future admirer. My view is that the more important thinkers are, the easier they are to radicalize or reverse. This helps explain why the great philosophers of the West have so often appeared in clusters, succeeding one another at relatively brief intervals during periods of especial ferment. 1. After Finitude After Finitude is unusually short for such an influential book of philosophy: running to just 178 pages in the original French, and an even more compact 128 pages in the English version, despite the introduction of roughly eight pages of new material for the English edition. Rather than summarizing Meillassoux’s book in the order he intended, I will focus on six points that strike me as the pillars of his debut book. Along the way, I will offer a few criticisms as well. The first pillar of the book is Meillassoux’s own term “correlationism.”1 Although he introduces this term as the name for an enemy, it is striking that Meillassoux remains impressed by correlationism much more than his fellow speculative realists are. This continued appreciation for his great enemy influences the shape of his own ontology. Is there a world outside our thinking of it, or does the world consist entirely in being thought? Traditionally, this dispute between realism and idealism has been dismissed in continental philosophy as a “pseudo-problem,” in a strategy pioneered by Husserl and extended by Heidegger. We cannot be realists, since following Kant we have no direct access to things-in-themselves. But neither are we idealists, since the human being is always already outside itself, aiming at objects in intentional experience, deeply engaged with practical implements, or stationed in some particular world-disclosing mood. The centuries-old dispute between realism and idealism is dissolved by saying that we cannot think either real or ideal in isolation from the other. There is neither human without world nor world without human, but only a primordial correlation or rapport between the two. This is what “correlationism” means: philosophy trapped in a permanent meditation on the human-world correlate, trying to find the best model of the correlate: is it language, intentionality, embodiment, or some other form of correlation between human and world? Among other problems, this generates some friction between philosophy and the literal meaning of science. When cosmologists say that the universe originated 13.5 billion years ago, they do not mean “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” but literally 13.5 billion years ago, well before conscious life existed, and thus at a time when there was no such thing as a correlate. Meillassoux also coins the term “ancestrality” (10) for the reality that predated the correlate, and later expands this term to “dia-chronicity,” (112) to refer to events occurring after the extinction of human beings no less than to those occurring before we existed. Up to this point, Meillassoux’s focus on ancestral entities existing prior to consciousness might seem like a straightforward realist who wants to unmask correlationism as just another form of idealism. Yet Meillassoux also admires the correlationist maneuver, which can obviously be traced back to Kant. Unlike a thinker such as Whitehead, Meillassoux feels no nostalgia for the pre-critical realism that came before Kant: “we cannot but be heirs of Kantianism,” he says (29). What impresses Meillassoux about correlationism is something both simple and familiar. If we attempt to think a tree outside thought, this is itself a thought . Any form of realism which thinks it can simply and directly address the world the way it is fails to escape the correlational circle, since the attempt to think something outside of thought is itself nothing other than a thought, and thereby collapses back into the very human-world correlate that it pretends to escape. For Meillassoux this step, suggested by Kant but first refined by the ensuing figures of German Idealism, marks decisive forward progress in the history of philosophy that must not be abolished. Any attempt to break free from the correlate must first acknowledge its mighty intellectual power. Realist though he may seem, Meillassoux’s works are filled with praise of such figures as Fichte and Hegel, not of so-called “naïve realists.” It is also the case that for Meillassoux, not all correlationisms are the same. The second pillar of his book is a distinction between various positions that I have termed “Meillassoux’s Spectrum,” though of course he is never so immodest as to name it after himself. He distinguishes between at least six different possible positions, and perhaps we could add even subtler variations if we wished. But in its simplest form, Meillassoux’s Spectrum allows for just four basic outlooks on the question of realism vs. anti-realism. Three of these are easy to understand, since we have already been discussing them. At one extreme is so-called “naïve realism,” which holds that a world exists outside the mind, and that we can know this world. Meillassoux rejects this naïve realism as having been overthrown by Kant’s critical philosophy. At the other extreme is subjective idealism, in which nothing exists outside the mind. For to think a dog outside thought immediately turns it into a thought, and therefore there cannot be anything outside; the very notion is meaningless. In between these two is what we have called correlationism. And here comes a crucial moment for Meillassoux, since he distinguishes between the two forms of “weak” and “strong” correlationism, and chooses the strong form as the launching pad for his own philosophy. Weak correlationism is easy to explain, since we all know it from the philosophy of Kant. The things-in-themselves can be thought but not known. They certainly must exist, since there cannot be appearances without something that appears. And we can think about them, which idealism holds to be impossible. They are simply unknowable due to the finitude of human thought. Strong correlationism is the new position introduced by Meillassoux (though he sees it at work in numerous twentieth century thinkers), midway between weak correlationism and subjective idealism. The major difference between the three positions is as follows. Weak correlationism says: “The things-in-themselves exist, but we cannot know them.” The subjective idealist says: “This is a contradiction in terms, since when we think the things-in-themselves, we already turn them into thoughts.” But the strong correlationist says: “Just because ‘things-in-themselves’ is a meaningless notion does not mean that they cannot exist. No one has ever traveled to the world-in-itself and come back to make a report on it. Thus, the fact that we cannot think things-in-themselves without contradiction does not prove that they do not exist anyway. There may be things-in-themselves, we simply are not capable of thinking them without contradiction form within the correlational circle.” This step is crucial for Meillassoux, since strong correlationism is the position he attempts to radicalize into his own new standpoint: speculative materialism. As I see it, this step of the argument fails. Strong correlationism cannot avoid collapsing into subjective idealism, since the statements of the strong correlationist are rendered meaningless from within. All three of the other positions in the Spectrum make perfectly good sense even for those who disagree with them. The naïve realist says that things-in-themselves exist and we can know them; the meaning of this statement is clear. The weak correlationist can say that things-in-themselves exist but lie forever beyond our grasp; this too makes perfect sense, even though the German Idealists try to show a contradiction at work here. We can also understand the claim of the subjective idealist that to think anything outside thought turns it into a thought, and that for this reason we cannot think the unthought. The strong correlationist, alone among the four, speaks nonsense . This person says “I cannot think the unthought without turning it into a thought, and yet the unthought might exist anyway.” But notice that the final phrase “the unthought might exist anyway” is fruitless for this purpose. For we have already heard that to think any unthought turns it into a thought. But now the strong correlationist wants to do two incompatible things simultaneously with this unthought. On the one hand, he neutralizes the unthought by showing that it instantly changes into just another thought. But on the other hand, he wants to appeal to the unthought as a haunting residue that might exist outside thought, thereby undercutting the absolute status of the human-world correlate found in idealism. But this is impossible. If you accept the argument that thinking the unthought turns it into a thought, you cannot also add “but maybe there is something outside that prevents this conversion from being absolutely true,” because this “something outside” is immediately converted into nothing but a thought for us. In short, Meillassoux here seems to be offering a kind of Zen koan: his “strong correlationism” is reminiscent of the gateless gate, or the sound of one hand clapping, or the command to punch Hegel in the jaw when meeting him on the road. We cannot at the same time both destroy the realist challenge of the things-in-themselves in order to undercut realism and reintroduce that very realist sense in order to undercut idealism. In a world where everything is instantly converted into thought, we cannot claim that there might be something extra-mental anyway, because this “might be something” is itself converted into a thought by the same rules that condemned dogs, trees, and houses to the idealist prison. This brings us to the third pillar of Meillassoux’s argument, which is the key to all the rest: the necessity of contingency. His strategy is to transform our supposed ignorance of things-in-themselves into an absolute knowledge that they exist without reason, and that the laws of nature can change at any time for no reason at all. In this way the cautious agnosticism of Kantian philosophies is avoided, but so is the collapse of reality into thought as found in German Idealism. Meillassoux does try to prove the existence of things-in-themselves existing outside thought; he simply holds that they must be proven after passing through the rigors of the correlationist challenge, not just arbitrarily decreed to exist in the manner of naïve realism. As he puts it, “Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing” (53). If idealism thinks that the human-world correlate is absolute, for Meillassoux it is the facticity of the correlate that is absolute. He tries to show this with a nice brief dialogue between five separate characters (55-59) which is covered in detail in my forthcoming book,2 but which I will simplify here for reasons of time. In this simplified version, we first imagine a dogmatic realist arguing with a dogmatic idealist. The realist says that we can know the truth about the things-in-themselves; the idealist counters that we can only the truth about thought, since all statements about reality must be turned into statements concerning our thoughts about reality. Here the correlationist enters and proclaims that both of these positions are equally dogmatic. For although we have access to nothing but thoughts, we cannot be sure that these thoughts are all that exist; there could be a reality outside thought, there is simply no way to know for sure. And this latter position is the one that Meillassoux attempts to transform from an agnostic, skeptical point into an ontological claim about the contingency of everything. Consider it this way. How does the correlationist defeat the idealist? The idealist holds that the existence of anything outside thought is impossible. The correlationist, by contrast, holds that something might exist outside the human-world correlate. But this “something might” has to be an absolute possibility. It cannot mean that “something outside thought might exist for thought ,” because that is what the idealist already says. No, the correlationist must mean that something might exist outside thought quite independently of thought. In other words, the correlationist says that idealism might be wrong, and this means it is absolutely true that idealism might be wrong. Thus, correlationism is no longer just a skeptical position. It holds that all the possibilities of the world are absolute possibilities. We have absolute knowledge that any of the possibilities about the existence or non-existence of things-in-themselves might be true, and this means that correlationism flips into Meillassoux’s own position: speculative materialism. As Meillassoux sees it, there are only two options here. Option A is to absolutize the human-world correlate, which is what the idealist does: there absolutely cannot be anything outside thought. Option B, by contrast, is to absolutize the facticity of the correlate: its character of simply being given to us, without any inherent necessity. The correlationist cannot have it both ways by saying: “there absolutely might be something outside thought, yet maybe this is absolutely impossible.” In other words, once we escape dogmatism we can only be idealists or speculative materialists, not correlationists. The human-world correlate is merely a fact, not an absolute necessity. But this facticity itself cannot be merely factical: it must be absolute. Here Meillassoux coins the French neologism factualité , which has been suitably translated into the English neologism “factiality.” (7, 122-3) Factialty means that for everything that exists, it is absolutely possible that it might be otherwise, not just that we cannot know whether or not it might be otherwise. Just as Kant transformed philosophy into a meditation on the categories governing human finitude, Meillassoux wishes to turn philosophy into a meditation on the necessary conditions of factiality, which he calls “figures”—a new technical term for him. (80) One such figure is that the law of non-contradiction must be true, and for an unusual reason. Since everything is proven to be contingent, nothing that exists can be contradictory, for whatever is contradictory has no opposite into which it might be transformed, and thus contingency would be impossible.3 Another such figure is that there must be something rather than nothing: for since contingency exists, something must exist in order to be contingent. It is a daring high-wire act, one that sacrifices realism to the correlational circle in order to rebuild it from out of its own ashes. Some might conclude that the lack of reason in things is a byproduct of the ignorance of finite humans, Meillassoux is making precisely the opposite point. For in fact, the doctrine of finitude usually leads directly to belief in a hidden reason. The fact that it lies beyond human comprehension merely increases our belief in this arbitrarily chosen concealed ground. By defending anew the concept of absolute knowledge Meillassoux evacuates the world of everything hidden. The reason for things having no reason is not that the reason is hidden, but that no reason exists. Thus, even while insisting on the necessity of non-contradiction, he rejects the other Leibnizian principle: sufficient reason. Everything simply is what it is, in purely immanent form, without deeply hidden causes. Or as Meillassoux puts it: “There is nothing beneath or beyond the manifest gratuitousness of the given—nothing but the limitless and lawless power of its destruction, emergence, or persistence” (63).The world is a “hyper-chaos”(64). But this is not the same thing as flux. For the chaos of the world is such that stability might occur just as easily as constant, turbulent change. Let’s now digress a bit, and return to the question of ancestrality, which Meillassoux transforms later in the book into “dia-chronicity.” Correlationism holds that all talk of a world outside the correlate is immediately recuperated by the correlate. The phrase “13.5 billion years ago” becomes “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” and the phrase “the universe following the extinction of humans” becomes “the universe following the extinction of humans for humans .” But notice that whether we talk about the world before or after humans, in both cases it is time that is used to challenge the correlate. Meillassoux has no interest in challenges that might be posed by space. For example, what about a vase in a lonely country house that topples to the floor and smashes when no one is there to watch it? Isn’t this also a challenge to correlationism, no less than the Big Bang or the heat death of the universe long after humans have vanished? In an eight-page supplement to the English translation of After Finitude ,4 possibly in response to my own 2007 review of the French original,5 Meillassoux bluntly denies that space is of any relevance to the question. Spatial distance is a merely harmless challenge to the human-world correlate. After all, even though no one is there in the lonely country house to witness the shattering of the vase, we can say that had there been an observer , that observer would have witnessed the toppling and destruction of the vase. For this event still occurs in a world in which the human-world correlate already exists, whereas the diachronicity of events both before and after the existence of humans makes it impossible to say that had there been an observer they would have witnessed the Big Bang occurring in such and such a fashion. However, it seems to me that Meillassoux merely asserts that the temporal simultaneity of our existence with that of the vase in the lonely country house is enough to render it harmless. It is true that the house does not exist prior to the correlate, but nonetheless it exists outside the correlate, and that is enough to make the same challenge. It is difficult to see why the “had there been an observer” maneuver succeeds in the case of a vase in the countryside in April 2011 but fails in the case of the Big Bang. This is not just a matter of nitpicking Meillassoux’s argumentative style: the fact that he bases his argument on time has at least two important consequences for his position. For in the first place, even though Meillassoux insists that the laws of nature are absolutely contingent, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense. That is to say, it is a paradoxical feature of Meillassoux’s philosophy that he does allow for the existence of laws of nature, and simply believes that they can change at any moment without reason. Within any given moment, laws of nature do exist. He never suggests that different parts of the universe can have different laws at the same time, nor does he have any interest in the laws of part/whole composition that take place within any given instant. Could it be the case that rather than being made of gold atoms, a small chunk of gold could be made of silver atoms, cotton, horses, or that this same small piece of gold could be made of gigantic vaults filled with even more gold? These are not topics that draw Meillassoux’s attention, since he is focused solely on how the laws of nature might change or endure from one moment to the next . Another implication for Meillassoux’s system is that his concept of things-in-themselves turns out to be to be inadequate. For when he proves that things-in-themselves can exist without humans, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense as well. Namely, things-in-themselves existed ten billion years ago, and they will continue to exist after all humans have succeeded in exterminating themselves. However, being able to exist before our births and after our deaths is just one small part of what it means to be a thing-in-itself. The more important part is that even if a thing is sitting on a table right now, in front of me, even if I stroke it lovingly or press my face up against it directly, I am still dealing only with a phenomenal version of the thing; the thing-in-itself continues to withdraw from all access. Yet no such thing is acknowledged by Meillassoux. For him finitude is a disaster, and absolute knowledge is in fact possible. Meillassoux’s thing-in-itself exists in independence only of the human lifespan , not of human knowledge. The fifth pillar of Meillassoux’s argument is his use of Cantor’s transfinite mathematics to show that even if the laws of nature are contingent, they need not be unstable, and thus we cannot use the apparent stability of nature to disprove his metaphysics of absolute contingency. What Cantor showed is that there are different sizes of infinity, and that all these infinities cannot be totalized in a single infinite number of infinities. Meillassoux sees this as crucial, since it allows him to discredit any “probabilistic” argument against his theory. The probabilistic argument (as defended quite clearly by Jean-René Vernes)6 would say this: given that the laws of nature seem so stable, it it is extremely improbable that there is no hidden reason for their remaining so stable. As Meillassoux sees it, probability is of value only when we can index an accessible total of cases. These can even be infinite: for example, there are an infinite number of points where a rope can break when stretched tight, but this does not stop us from calculating probabilities for various sections of the rope to break. By contrast, there is no way to sum up the number of possible laws of nature. For here there is no way to totalize; we cannot stand outside of nature and calculate the possible number of laws so as to determine the probabilities that any one of them might change. Therefore, although we can speak of probability when dealing with intraworldly events such as elections, horse races, and coin-flips, we cannot use the words “probable” or “improbable” when describing alterations at the level of nature as a whole. Rather than commenting on the validity of this argument and its use of Cantor, let me simply note that it once again creates a dualistic ontology. We already saw that Meillassoux treats time differently from space. In analogous fashion, he now treats the level of world differently from that of intraworldly events. The emergence of worlds is purely contingent and virtual and governed by no probability at all, while events within the world necessarily follow laws (even if these laws can change at any moment without reason), and thus their probabilities can be calculated. It is a strategy deeply reminiscent of Badiou’s (2005) own dualism between the normal “state of the situation” and the rare and intermittent “event.” The sixth and final pillar of Meillassoux’s book can be dealt with briefly, since we have already touched on it elsewhere. It comes at the very beginning of the book, when Meillassoux says that we must revive the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and that the primary qualities are the ones that can be mathematized. He admits that he has not yet published a proof of this idea, though in fact it is already known as one of his primary doctrines. And here we encounter the familiar problem with Meillassoux’s inadequate conception of things-in-themselves. “Primary qualities” refers to those qualities that a thing has independently of its relations with us or anything else. But if the primary qualities can be mathematized, this means that they are not entirely independent of us, since our knowledge can get right to the bottom of them. The mathematized qualities of things are independent of us only in Meillassoux’s sense that they will still have those qualities even when all humans are dead. But to repeat, autonomy from the human lifespan is not the same as autonomy from human access. Here once more Meillassoux is concerned only with independence from the human-world correlate across time, not in any given instant. 2. L’Inexistence divine In 1997, the same year in which he turned thirty years old, Meillassoux earned his doctorate at the École normale supériuere with a brazen dissertation entitled L’Inexistence divine ( The Divine Inexistence ). The work was substantially revised in 2003. But even then, with typical fastidiousness, Meillassoux decided that the work was not yet ready for press. It has now been scrapped in favor of some future, multi-volume work bearing the same title. While writing my book on Meillassoux for Edinburgh University Press, I was permitted to translate excerpts from this unpublished work for use as an appendix in my own book; in total, the appendix contains approximately twenty percent of Meillassoux’s 2003 manuscript, the first time any of it will be published in any language. Nonetheless, a portion of the argument was already tested in the article “Spectral Dilemma,” published in English in the journal Collapse (2008: 261-75). There the philosophical motives for the virtual God are already made clear. What troubles us most are early deaths, brutal deaths, deaths of especial injustice– the sorts of deaths in which the brutal twentieth century was so abundant. And here, neither the atheist nor the believer can help us. The atheist can offer nothing but a sad and cynical resignation when reflecting on the victims of these terrible crimes. The believer does little better, being unable to explain how God could have allowed such things to happen, due to the famous intractability of the problem of evil. The solution offered to this dilemma by Meillassoux is bold, and all the more so given that he emerges from such a deeply Leftist, materialist, and unreligious background. His solution is that God does not yet exist, and therefore is not blameworthy for these catastrophes. Given that everything is contingent in Meillassoux’s philosophy, this God and divine justice might never exist, but they can at least exist as an object of hope. Let’s begin by jumping to the end of L’Inexistence divine , where the alternatives are laid out so nicely. There are four basic attitudes that humans can have towards God, Meillassoux says. First, we can believe in God because he exists. This is the classical theist attitude, rejected for the simple reason that it would be amoral and blasphemous to believe in a God who allows children to be eaten by dogs, to use Dostoevsky’s example. Second, we can disbelieve in God because he does not exist: the classical atheist attitude. But this leads to sadness, cynicism, and a sneering contempt for the greatness of human capacity. The third option, rather more complex, is to disbelieve in God because he does exist: in other words, to exist in rebellion against God as the one who must be blamed for the evils of the earth. The examples here might range from Lucifer himself, to the more human figure of Captain Ahab in Melville’s Moby-Dick , to Werner Herzog’s even more recent catchphrase, “Every man for himself, and God against all.” That leaves only the fourth option: believing in God because he does not exist. Meillassoux closes his book by saying that the fourth option has now been tried (namely, in the course of his own book), and that now that all four have been specified, we must choose. The first reaction to this theory of the inexistent God will be laughter. Few readers will ever be literally convinced by it, and probably none will immediately be convinced by it. But if we ask ourselves why we laugh, the answer is because it sounds so improbable that an inexistent God might suddenly emerge and resurrect the dead. It obviously sounds more like a gullible theology than a rigorous piece of philosophical work. Yet two things need to be kept in mind. First, Meillassoux’s theories are hardly more unlikely than those of great philosophers of the past such as Plato, Plotinus, Avicenna, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, or Whitehead. We read the great philosophers not because their systems are plausible in commonsense terms that can be measured by the laws of probability. Instead, we read them precisely because they shatter the existing framework of common sense and open up new window on the universe. Second, and even more importantly, Meillassoux has already rejected probability as a valid measuring stick in philosophy. Or rather, he accepts probability in the intra-worldly realm (where it is linked with potentiality), and rejects it at the level of the world itself (where potentiality is replaced with what he calls virtuality). The virtual God can appear at any moment for no reason at all, just as any other new configuration of laws of nature can appear: in a manner that the laws of probability cannot calculate. Responding to those who might ridicule the idea of a sudden emergence of God and a resurrection of the dead, Meillassoux cites Pascal, who asserts that the resurrection of the dead would be far less incredible than the fact that we were born in the first place. This shifts philosophy onto new ground. Rather than concerning ourselves with what is likely to happen in the world as we know it, we focus instead on the most important things that could happen. For this reason, the expected objection that a virtual God is no more likely to appear than a virtual unicorn or a virtual flying spaghetti monster misses the point. Unicorns and spaghetti monsters could also appear, just like any other non-contradictory thing. But these would just be novel bizarre entities among others, not the heralds of completely new worlds. For Meillassoux, the emergence of matter, life, and thought have been the three truly amazing advents of the world so far, each of them dependent on the advent(s) preceding them. As he sees it, there can be no greater intraworldly entity than the human beings who already exist, since nothing in the world is better than the absolute knowledge of which humans alone are capable. This means that the next great advent must be something that perfects human beings rather than superseding them. And this can only be the world of justice, in which the dead are resurrected and their horrible deaths partially cancelled (Meillassoux never considers the possibility of a God who would literally erase the pre-divine past so that it never happened at all). The only immortality worth having is an immortality of this life, not an existence in some ill-defined afterworld. Human existence, he holds, must always be governed by a “symbol” that gives us the “immanent and comprehensible inscription of values in a world.” And just as cosmic history made the three great contingent leaps of matter, life, and thought, with a leap to justice as the only one still to come, a similar structure occurs within human culture and its symbols, which consist so far of the cosmological, naturalistic, and historical symbols, with a “factial” symbol still to come. We can review each of these symbols briefly. The cosmological symbol refers to the ancient dualism between the terrestrial and celestial spheres. Here below everything is conflict, corruption, and decay; but in the heavens nothing is perishable, all movement is circular, and everything is arranged in mutual harmony. This symbol is ended by modern physics when Galileo discovers such blemishes as sunspots and craters on the moon, and when Newton integrates both celestial and terrestrial movement into a single gravitational law. Next comes the naturalistic or romantic symbol, in which perfection comes not from the sky but from nature itself. The world is filled with pretty flowers (Meillassoux claims that the ancients never discussed the beauty of flowers until Plotinus in the third century) and with living creatures naturally moved by pity, at least until society corrupts them. This symbol collapses in the face of reality as we know it, since pity is no more common than war, corruption, and violence. This brings us to the historical symbol, which only now is passing away. Bad things may happen, but history has an inner logic of its own, such that everything works out in the end. The ultimate form of the historical symbol is the economic symbol, whether in a Marxist or neo-liberal form. Just as the Marxist holds that the inner economic logic of the capitalists will inexorably lead them to self-destruction, the neo-liberal assumes that the sum total of individual selfish actions will lead, in the long run, to the greatest possible good. We worship the economy and let it guide history for us, just as the ancients worshipped celestial bodies and held them to be free from blemish. The final remaining symbol is the factial symbol, which Meillassoux hopes will now emerge. Factiality, we recall, is his term for the absolute contingency of everything that exists. Once we have grasped this absolute contingency, we are free to expect the dramatic advent of the coming fourth World: the world of justice, inaugurated by a virtual God and even mediated by a messianic human figure. There is the added feature, however, that this messiah must abandon all claims to special status once the messianic realm of justice is achieved. The messianic figure will then be no more special than any person on the street, since a reign of human equality will have arisen. Although this focus on human being might seem like a return to standard humanism, Meillassoux holds that human pre-eminence has never truly been maintained. Previously, humans have been treated as special only because they contemplate the Good, because they resemble their omnipotent creator, or because they happen to be the temporary victors in a cruel Darwinian death-match between millions of living species. For Meillassoux, by contrast, humans have value because they know the eternal. But it is not the eternal that is important, since this merely represents the blind, anonymous contingency of each thing. What is important is not knowledge of the eternal , but knowledge of the eternal. We should not admire Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods; Prometheus is simply as bad as all the gods, no matter how much he increased our power. Feuerbach and Marx were wrong to say that God is a projection of the human essence, since for Meillassoux the usual concept of God represents the degradation of the human essence. If the traditional God was allowed to inflict plagues and tsunamis on the human race, the Promethean human of the twentieth century simply assumes the right to inflict death camps and atomic fireballs instead. In this respect, we have simply begun to imitate the degradation of humanity that was formerly invested in an omnipotent and arbitrary God. In response to charges that absolute contingency might lead to political quietism, Meillassoux counters that the World of justice would mean nothing unless we had already hoped for it beforehand. A World of justice that came along at random would merely be an improved third World of thought: indeed, a perfect one. But it would have satisfied no craving, and would therefore have no redemptive power. For this reason, we must actively hope for the fourth World of justice for such a fourth World ever to arise. Not only justice, but beauty is dependent on such hope: for Meillassoux, who is here somewhat dependent on Kant, beauty means an accord between our human symbolization and the actual world, which could never be present in a World of the blessed any more than justice could. And just as a messianic figure is needed to incarnate our hope and then abandon power once the World of justice is realized, it is the figure of the child whose fragile contingency shows us a dignity and a demand for justice beyond all power. 3. Meillassoux Radicalized or Reversed Given the promising reception of Meillassoux’s first book, it would not be groundless to engage in early speculation about what it might take to earn him a place in the history of philosophy. Maybe this will never happen—who knows?—but quite possibly it will: his lucid argumentative methods and sheer philosophical imagination at least make him a good candidate to be read well into the future, especially following further elaboration in print of his mature system. Philosophy is often practiced as thought it were nothing more than the amassing of “knockdown arguments.” But this is no more insightful than saying that good architecture is the amassing of steal beams. It is true that poorly constructed building cannot stand for long, but sound construction is merely the first, indispensable step in building. In fact, I am inclined to say that what really makes a philosopher important is not being right, but being wrong . I mean this in a very specific sense. I once heard the interesting remark about twentieth century culture that “you have to remember that the sixties really happened in the seventies.” That is to say, it was in the 1970’s rather than the more honored 1960’s that civil rights, free love, long hair, and the rock and roll drug culture really took root. With respect to the history of philosophy, we might just as easily say: “you have to remember that Plato really happened in Aristotle,” that “Kant really happened in Hegel” or “Hume really happened in Kant,” or that “Husserl’s phenomenology first achieved its truth in Heidegger.” One becomes an important philosopher not by being right, but by attracting rebellious admirers who tell you that you are wrong , even as their own careers silently orbit around your own. To recruit faithful disciples may be comforting and flattering, but the greatest thinkers have generally had to experience refutation at the hands of their most talented heirs. For this reason, I would propose that we size up the magnitude of living thinkers not by deciding how many times they are right and wrong, but by asking instead: who would take the trouble to refute this author? For this reason I do not ask: “Is Meillassoux right?”, since I do not believe in the virtual God myself, nor am I convinced by any important aspect of Meillassoux’s philosophy. Instead, I ask if there are interesting ways to overturn him. Only by being overturned, by no longer remaining a contemporary, does one become a classic. Let’s begin with a simple model of refutation, which can be refined further at a later date once the basic point is established. One kind of refutation simply consists in saying: “This author is a complete idiot.” The refuter now walks away in celebration, and no link between the present and the future is built; all is reduced to rubble. But this sort of mediocre triumphalism is generally practiced by those who achieve little of their own, and is not especially interesting. Much more interesting is the sort of refutation that does not take its target to be a complete idiot. I would like to suggest that there are just two basic ways in which this can be done: radicalization and reversal . It has not escaped my notice that this is a fairly good match for the Deleuzian distinction between irony and humor. Whereas irony critiques and adopts the opposite principle of what it attacks, humor accepts what it confronts but pushes it into highly exaggerated form. The ironist is like the worker who sows chaos by rebeling and contradicting the boss, while the humorist is like the worker who follows orders to an absurdly literal degree, with equally chaotic results. Let’s start with a few examples. In Aristotle’s treatment of Plato, and Heidegger’s of Husserl, we find reversal. Plato’s eidei are transformed by Aristotle into mere secondary substances, and the individual worldly things despised by Plato become what is primary. For Husserl what is primary is whatever is present to consciousness, while for Heidegger this is precisely what is secondary, since the primary stuff of the world withdraws from any form of presence at all. As for radicalization, it is most easily found in the transformation of Kant by German Idealism: “Kant was right to wall off the things-in-themselves from human access, and simply should have realized that the thought of the Ding an sich is also a thought, and thereby the noumena are just special cases of the phenomena,” with much following from this discovery. It would also be easy to read Spinoza as a radicalizer of Descartes, and Berkeley and Hume as radicalized versions of Locke. Perhaps the distinction is now sufficiently clear. Admiring refutations are not those that say “Professor X is an idiot,” which is merely the flip side of the eager disciple’s fruitless “Professor X got everything right.” Instead, it will be some variant of one of the following two options: “Professor X is important, but got it backwards,” or “Professor X is important, but didn’t push things far enough.” In the history of philosophy these two latter cases have often been painful in purely human terms: Aristotle expresses sadness at refuting Plato, Kant is openly annoyed at Fichte, and Husserl feels betrayed and used by Heidegger. Rude handling from later figures almost seems to be the sine qua non of being a great philosopher. Now, it has already been claimed that Meillassoux is an emerging philosopher of the first importance, and by no less a figure than Alain Badiou: “It would be no exaggeration to say that Quentin Meillassoux has opened up a new path in the history of philosophy…” (Preface, vii). But rather than taking Badiou’s word for it, or rejecting his word, we might experiment by asking how Meillassoux could be radicalized or reversed. Are there interesting ways of doing this that might launch whole new schools of philosophy, unexpected or even condemned by Meillassoux himself? While no one can see the future, the present is poor when it is not riddled with virtual futures. The relation between philosophers and their predecessors and successors is always somewhat complicated, of course. But generally there is one central divergence at stake, which might be taken as the key to all the others. On this basis we could say that new thinkers primarily radicalize or primarily reverse the main ideas of their chief philosophical forerunner. There may be specific historical conditions and perhaps even personality traits connected with these two types, but this question can be left aside for now. More important for us is that radicalizers will generally be followed by reversers, and vice versa. Consider the textbook example of a reversal in the history of philosophy: Kant’s Copernican Revolution, which inverts the so-called dogmatic tradition that addresses the world itself, and makes the world revolve instead around the conditions by which it is known. While it is not completely impossible that Kant’s successors might have re-reversed this principle back into a new and stronger dogmatic realism, conditions were premature for such a move. Anyone doing this too early would likely have been an angry anti-Kantian reactionary rather than an original thinker in command of a genuinely new realist principle. The far more likely outcome is the one that actually happened: Kant’s reversal of his predecessors was viewed as incomplete, or as retaining lamentable bits of the traditional view, which despite his admirable breakthrough he was unable to shake off. This was the view of German Idealism, anyway. In similar fashion, Spinoza could also be viewed as a radicalizer of Descartes, who is equally accused of preserving various Scholastic dogmas in an otherwise radical project of philosophical reversal. The point is this: reversals in the history of thought tend to be followed soon thereafter by radicalizations of those reversals. The same may hold true in reverse: radicalizations might generally be followed by reversals, given that it is not always possible to be more radical than the radicals have already been. Consider the case of Husserl, who radicalizes Brentano’s early vagueness about what lies beyond immanent objectivity, and Twardowski’s assertion that there must be an external object lying outside the intentional content, by collapsing everything into the intentional sphere: there is no difference between the Berlin in my consciousness and the actual Berlin that is home to millions of people. It is difficult to see how one could be even more radical than Husserl’s idealist turn here. And thus the road is paved to Heidegger’s reversal of classical phenomenology, in which the key point is what lies deeper than any presence to consciousness: the Sein whose power and obscurity cannot be made exhaustively present, but only sends itself in historical epochs. In similar fashion we might also read Leibniz as a reverser of Spinoza’s radicalization, retrieving a strong sense of individual substance and a certain validity of what the Scholastics had said. Returning to Meillassoux, we might ask which kind of philosopher he is: a radicalizer or a reverser? At present, Meillassoux looks to me like a radicalizer (though for now his future remains shrouded in mist). He takes the correlationist tradition, which allows us to speak only of the relation between human and world, and tries to raise it into an even more extreme claim about the absolute contingency of everything. But whereas German Idealism did this by trying to collapse the distinction between thought and world entirely into the “thought” side, Meillassoux does it by trying to shift the non-absolute contingency of the thought-world correlate from epistemology to ontology. It is no longer a question of the inability of human knowledge to know what lies outside the correlate, but the inability of reality itself to be rooted in any definite laws. Furthermore, if we look at the various features of Meillassoux’s philosophy identified earlier tonight, all but one are already so radical that there is no obvious way to push them further. The one exception would be his claim that the world as a whole can change for no reason at any moment, coupled with the inconsistent claim that within a given world there are laws of nature that everything must follow. If gravitational attraction between all masses is a current law in our world, then for Meillassoux there can be no exceptions to this law for as long as it remains in force. A toppled vase will fall to the floor every time for sure,unless there is a cosmic change by which the laws of nature as a whole have altered. (This is reminiscent of the late medieval distinction between the absolute and ordained power of God, according to which God has the power to set or change the laws of nature, but not to contravene those laws locally once they are set.) On this point, to radicalize Meillassoux would simply be to say: there are no laws of nature even in the local sense. Everything that happens, even in the world here and now, is purely contingent and not governed by even a trace of law. And while this would be a more consistent development of Meillassoux’s thoughts on contingency, it is difficult to see how it could lead to a new philosophy. Instead, the admiring successors of Meillassoux are more likely to reverse one of his already sufficiently radical points. At least four candidates come to mind: *First, we have seen that Meillassoux thinks correlationism is challenged by a time before or after consciousness, but not by a space lying outside it. Perhaps this could be reversed into saying that spatial exteriority is the really crucial point. The arguments on this point are perhaps the least convincing in After Finitude (and do not even occur in the original French edition), and therefore it might be a candidate for the “blind spot” of which no philosopher is ever free. *Second, Meillassoux uses Cantor to claim that the contingency of laws of nature would not entail that they are unstable. A successor of Meillassoux might claim that it does make them unstable, and celebrate this fact. This person would then have to explain why common sense seems to encounter a relatively stable world despite its truly rampant instability. Whereas Meillassoux’s problem is to show how stability might exist despite contingency, this successor’s problem would be slightly different: to show why actual, full-blown instability might have the appearance of stability. *Third, Meillassoux claims that the primary qualities of things are those that can be mathematized. He might be reversed by a successor who says the opposite: the mathematizable qualities are the secondary ones, and the primary ones are those that elude symbolic formulation. While this is a perfectly valid possible objection to Meillassoux, it is one that is made in advance by some of his predecessors and is still made by some of his peers, making it less interesting for futurology than some of his other points. *Fourth and finally, whereas Meillassoux claims that God does not exist but might exist in the future, a successor might argue even more bizarrely that God has always existed but might vanish in the future. Let’s arbitrarily select the first of these possibilities, and imagine briefly where it might lead, if pursued in the future by admiring detractors. Meillassoux comes from the circle of Badiou, and some of Badiou’s most ardent admirers are found in Latin America. So, let’s imagine that towards mid-century some ingenious reversers of Meillassoux emerge in that portion of the Spanish-speaking world. Just for fun, let’s call them Castro and Chávez. And in order to avoid any confusion with the present-day politicians of those names, we will stipulate that Meillassoux’s great successors are both women. The philosopher Castro (we will suppose she comes from Peru) reverses Meillassoux’s argument that the ancestral or diachronic are what most threaten the human-world correlate. Instead, she claims that the diachronic does not threaten the correlate at all, and that we must instead look at space as what ruins the correlate and demands a strange new realism. What would such a philosophy look like? In order to determine this, we might ask what price Meillassoux pays for doing it the opposite way. As I see it, he pays in two separate ways. One is that laws of nature for him are contingent over time . The laws of nature apply to the universe as a whole at any given moment, and would be changed globally if they are ever changed at all. The second price he pays is that Meillassoux has no mereology , or theory of parts and wholes. Everything for him is on the level of the given, or immanent in experience, with the sole proviso that the laws governing this immanence might change without notice at any given moment. In reversing Meillassoux, Castro makes the following claims in the preface to her stunning debut book of 2045, The Cosmos and its Neighborhoods , rapidly translated from Spanish into all the languages of the world: Despite his brilliant analysis of the contingency of laws of nature over time, Meillassoux gets two important assumptions wrong. First, he allows for only one set of contingent laws to govern nature as a whole. Second, he allows laws to govern only the world that is immanent in experience, and thereby fails to explore the contingency among part-whole relations. In this book I will argue, first, that the laws of nature vary in any given instant between one region of the universe and the next; and second, that the world is made up of layers of parts and wholes that are also contingent with respect to one another. Those are the words of Castro. This may sound like a hopeless free-for-all of chaos, yet the book somehow succeeds in drawing some compelling deductions about how laws must vary from one place or level in the world to the next. Trapped in the limited horizon of 2011, and not yet inspired by the heavily balkanized political and technological situation of 2050 that somehow lends additional credence to Castro’s vision, we can only vaguely grasp what such a philosophy might look like. After this reversal of Meillassoux by Castro, the usual pattern leads us to expect a radicalization by Chávez, a young Argentine student of Castro. How could the already strange theories of Castro be radicalized? Perhaps as follows, in a disturbing new book entitled The Implosion of the Neighborhoods , which argues as follows: Castro was right to shift the Meillassouxian framework of contingency from time to space. However, in this respect she retained a surprisingly traditional opposition between the two. In this book I will show that time and space collapse into one another. This may sound too much like the discredited four-dimensional block universe of twentieth century physics and philosophy. However, the four-dimensional universe is a model biased in favor of space, merely adding an extra dimension to the commonsense spatial continuum while stipulating that the serial passage of time is an illusion. In this book I will argue instead for a one-dimensional space-time modeled after our experience of time, in which there is no simultaneous co-existence at all between different parts of the universe, or ‘neighborhoods’ as my esteemed teacher Castro has called them. Instead, the various portions of the universe link to one another by succession rather than by coexistence. Buenos Aires, New York, and Amsterdam do not exist simultaneously in the same landscape, but one after the other in the mind of some observer, and this observer can only be an observer much larger than any human. Against Meillassoux’s notion of a virtual God that does not exist now but might exist in the future, I will argue for an actual God that surveys the universe in sequence, thereby generating the illusion of spatial diversity and even the illusion of individual minds located within that diversity. Once this divine observer dies, the universe as a whole must perish. Again, these ideas are so bizarre that we of 2011 can barely comprehend them, just as Aristotle would have had a difficult time grasping the theories of Descartes. We could then perhaps imagine a further reversal of this theory, emanating from the intellectually resurgent Philippines of the twenty-second century. The Filipino School might argue that the universe is already dead, given the collapse of its spatial richness into the serial observations of a flimsy and mortal God. The virtual universe does not yet exist, but might exist in fully spatial form in the future, and this would require the death of God and the resulting liberation of God’s succession of images as independent, spatially situated realities. With a bit of sharpening, we might be able to make all of these imaginary thinkers more intuitively clear. Along with the history of philosophy, there might arise a new discipline generating imaginary futures for philosophy. The richness of Meillassoux’s system comes not from the fact that he is plausibly right about so many things, but because his philosophy offers such a treasury of bold statements ripe for being radicalized or reversed. He is a rich target for many still-unborn intellectual heirs, and this is what gives him the chance to be an important figure. NOTES 1. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude . Trans. R Brassier. (London: Continuum, 2008.) Page 5. The word “correlationism” does not appear in his doctoral thesis. As Meillassoux informed me in an email of February 8, 2011, he first coined this term in 2003 or 2004, while editing for publication a lecture he had given at the École normale supérieure on a day devoted to the theme of “Philosophy and Mathematics,” an event including Alain Badiou as one of the participants. 2. Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making . (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2011). 3. In an email of December 6, 2010, Meillassoux clarifies that in After Finitude he only deduces the impossibility of a “universal contradiction,” not of a determinate contradiction. In the same email he suggests that he can also prove the latter, though the proof is somewhat lengthier than the one found in After Finitude . 4. After Finitude (18-26), in the passage falling between the two sets of triple asterisks. These pages were sent by Meillassoux to translator Ray Brassier (in French) during the translation process, and do not appear in the original French version of the book. 5. Graham Harman, “Quentin Meillassoux: A New French Philosopher.” Philosophy Today 51.1 (2007): Pages 104-117. The passage where I raise the question of space can be found in the first column of page 107. 6. Vernes is first cited on p. 95 of After Finitude . See Jean-René Vernes, Critique de la raison aléatoire, ou Descartes contra Kant . (Paris: Aubier, 1982).  . (shrink)

The article is devoted to the analysis of the phenomenon of historical experience in Gadamer's hermeneutics and Ankersmit's philosophical-historical concept. The interest of the philosophy of history in experience was actualized against the background of exhaustion of the heuristic potential of historical narrativism and constructivism, closely related to the so-called "linguistic turn". At first glance, Gadamer and Ankersmit are representing antinomic interpretations of historical experience: as mediated by the effects of involvement in a tradition or heritage (...) and direct, extracontextual encounter with the past. However, the investigation proves that, despite the apparent antinomy of these approaches, the Gadamerian hermeneutic experience as an experience of the prevailing historical reality is not so far from the sublime historical experience of Ankersmit. And, on the contrary, the sublime historical experience, despite its claims to immediacy, turns out to be an experience of the finitude of human existence, that is, it is close to what Gadamer considered the essence of hermeneutic experience. In both cases, historical experience is considered as a condition for the possibility of understanding the past, and therefore, the question of the universal structure of such experience and understanding necessarily arises. The differences in the positions of the two authors stem from fundamentally different ontological prejudices that they share. For Gadamer, this is the reduction of history to a linguistically structured heritage, as a result of which most of the past falls out of hermeneutic experience. For Ankersmit, this is an uncritical understanding of time, as a result of which his concept of the sublime does not receive a reliable methodological foundation. Clarification of the temporality of the sublime historical, as well as rejection of the rigid connection between historical experience and language, open the prospect of removing the abstract antinomy of contextuality and immediacy of historical experience. The temporality of human existence turns out to be a universal prerequisite of historical experience, the two opposite forms of which are heredity and discontinuity. Contrary to the widespread criticism of Ankersmit's theory as far from historiographical practice, the development of the potential of the concept of sublime historical experience reveals its relevance to the dynamic and tragic modern history that Ukraine is currently experiencing. (shrink)

This paper explores Paul Tillich’s use of the Friedrich Schelling’s philosophy in his explorations of the relevance of historical forms of Christian belief to contemporary culture, where human experience is marked by anxiety and guilt, and where the search for ultimate meanings seems to dead-end in meaninglessness. For Tillich as for Schelling, religion points to metaphysics. The only literal or nonsymbolic truth about God is that God is the affirmation of being over against the possibility of nonbeing, a (...) divine Yes that is an overcoming of a prior No or self-inclusion. The ambiguity of existence as current human beings experience it is itself religious experience. (shrink)

Christian theology has entered into the discourse of finitude via the contrast to the attributes of divine infinity; human finitude is hence interpreted as the culpability of a life form that depends on divine grace and redemption. This chapter elaborates and defends the claim according to which philosophical hermeneutics can be understood as a philosophy of human finitude. In its different versions from Dilthey to Vattimo, philosophical hermeneutics explores human finitude as (...) the prime condition for our worldly engagements and entitlements in all its aspects. The chapter deals with finitude regarding the limits of our knowledge and the opaqueness of our mortal existence, elaborating on the event character of historical understanding and experience. Heidegger relates finitude to the understanding of Being, claiming that we have to understand this joint as the event that originates Dasein and hence indicates the essence of man. (shrink)

Phenomenological realism, in the tradition of Dietrich von Hildebrand, is advanced as a promising methodology for a theistic philosophy of divine and human agency. Phenomenological realism is defended in contrast to the practice of historicalism -- the view that a philosophy of mind and God should always be done as part of a thoroughgoing history of philosophy, e.g. the use of examples in analytic theology should be subordinated to engaging the work of Kant and other great philosophers. The (...) criticism of theism based on forms of naturalism that give exclusive authority to the physical sciences is criticized from a phenomenological, realist perspective. (shrink)

This paper wishes to offer a historical derivation of the mature Diderot’s fully materialistic, physiological theory of the soul, and to show the conflict between the theological concept of the soul as a principle of freedom, and the materialistic-deterministic concept of the soul, in his philosophical and literary oeuvre. In historical respect, Diderot formulated his mature position on the basis of Locke’s theory of ‘thinking matter’, of Toland’s idea that ‘action is essential to matter’, of Maupertuis’s theory of (...) ‘spontaneous creative degeneration’. We present and analyze these theories one by one, together with Voltaire’s propaganda of the Lockean conception. Next, d’Alembert’s orthodox philosophy of the soul is examined, as this was Diderot’s immediate target in Le Rêve d’Alembert. The last chapters of the paper describe the afore-mentioned conflict within Diderot’s philosophy of the soul. We reach the conclusion that in Diderot’s theory, soul as a not fully determined substance still seems the ‘differentia’ of man from the rest of the living beings, though he would certainly argue that our freedom is very limited. A philosophical comparison with Kant’s account of human freedom closes the article. (shrink)

This paper wishes to offer a historical derivation of the mature Diderot’s fully materialistic, physiological theory of the soul, and to show the conflict between the theological concept of the soul as a principle of freedom, and the materialistic-deterministic concept of the soul, in his philosophical and literary oeuvre. In historical respect, Diderot formulated his mature position on the basis of Locke’s theory of ‘thinking matter’, of Toland’s idea that ‘action is essential to matter’, of Maupertuis’s theory of (...) ‘spontaneous creative degeneration’. We present and analyze these theories one by one, together with Voltaire’s propaganda of the Lockean conception. Next, d’Alembert’s orthodox philosophy of the soul is examined, as this was Diderot’s immediate target in Le Rêve d’Alembert. The last chapters of the paper describe the afore-mentioned conflict within Diderot’s philosophy of the soul. We reach the conclusion that in Diderot’s theory, soul as a not fully determined substance still seems the ‘differentia’ of man from the rest of the living beings, though he would certainly argue that our freedom is very limited. A philosophical comparison with Kant’s account of human freedom closes the article. (shrink)

Radical Orthodoxy (RO) accepts the post-structuralist critiques of autonomous human agency while liberation theologians embrace Enlightenment ideals ofsubjectivity and the secular political space where agency is exercised. RO theologians think that by accepting these premises, liberation theology fails to resist violence and nihilism that are the inevitable fruit of secular autonomy. I want to formulate a liberationist response to these objections. Liberationists do not see human and divine agency as fundamentally opposed, but rather the deepest strivings of (...) the human spirit for justice are on the same trajectory as the Kingdom of God. Human and divine agency are tied together through the notion of a utopia whereby these strivings for justice are expressed in a finite and historical way. This emancipative use of reason in the construction of a utopia provides a means for divine and human agency to interact without destroying the human autonomy of the secular sphere. (shrink)

Is suicide wrong, profoundly morally wrong? Almost always wrong, but excusable in a few cases? Sometimes morally permissible? Imprudent, but not wrong? Is it sick, a matter of mental illness? Is it a private matter or a largely social one? Could it sometimes be right, or a "noble duty," or even a fundamental human right? Whether it is called "suicide" or not, what role may a person play in the end of his or her own life? This collection of (...) primary sources--the principal texts of ethical interest from major writers in western and nonwestern cultures, from the principal religious traditions, and from oral cultures where observer reports of traditional practices are available, spanning Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Oceania, the Arctic, and North and South America--facilitates exploration of many controversial practical issues: physician-assisted suicide or aid-in-dying; suicide in social or political protest; self-sacrifice and martyrdom; suicides of honor or loyalty; religious and ritual practices that lead to death, including sati or widow-burning, hara-kiri, and sallekhana, or fasting unto death; and suicide bombings, kamikaze missions, jihad, and other tactical and military suicides. This collection has no interest in taking sides in controversies about the ethics of suicide; rather, rather, it serves to expand the character of these debates, by showing them to be multi-dimensional, a complex and vital part of human ethical thought. (shrink)

Despite the recent ferocious public debate about belief, the concept most central to the discussion—God—frequently remains vaguely and obscurely described. Are those engaged in these arguments even talking about the same thing? In a wide-ranging response to this confusion, esteemed scholar David Bentley Hart pursues a clarification of how the word “God” functions in the world’s great theistic faiths. Ranging broadly across Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Vedantic and Bhaktic Hinduism, Sikhism, and Buddhism, Hart explores how these great intellectual traditions treat humanity’s (...) knowledge of the divine mysteries. Constructing his argument around three principal metaphysical “moments”—being, consciousness, and bliss—the author demonstrates an essential continuity between our fundamental experience of reality and the ultimate reality to which that experience inevitably points. Thoroughly dismissing such blatant misconceptions as the deists' concept of God, as well as the fundamentalist view of the Bible as an objective historical record, Hart provides a welcome antidote to simplistic manifestoes. In doing so, he plumbs the depths of humanity’s experience of the world as powerful evidence for the reality of God and captures the beauty and poetry of traditional reflection upon the divine. (shrink)

_From one of the most revered scholars of religion, an incisive explanation of how the word “God” functions in the world’s great faiths_ Despite the recent ferocious public debate about belief, the concept most central to the discussion—God—frequently remains vaguely and obscurely described. Are those engaged in these arguments even talking about the same thing? In a wide-ranging response to this confusion, esteemed scholar David Bentley Hart pursues a clarification of how the word “God” functions in the world’s great theistic (...) faiths. Ranging broadly across Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Vedantic and Bhaktic Hinduism, Sikhism, and Buddhism, Hart explores how these great intellectual traditions treat humanity’s knowledge of the divine mysteries. Constructing his argument around three principal metaphysical “moments”—being, consciousness, and bliss—the author demonstrates an essential continuity between our fundamental experience of reality and the ultimate reality to which that experience inevitably points. Thoroughly dismissing such blatant misconceptions as the deists' concept of God, as well as the fundamentalist view of the Bible as an objective historical record, Hart provides a welcome antidote to simplistic manifestoes. In doing so, he plumbs the depths of humanity’s experience of the world as powerful evidence for the reality of God and captures the beauty and poetry of traditional reflection upon the divine. (shrink)

Radical Orthodoxy (RO) accepts the post-structuralist critiques of autonomous human agency while liberation theologians embrace Enlightenment ideals ofsubjectivity and the secular political space where agency is exercised. RO theologians think that by accepting these premises, liberation theology fails to resist violence and nihilism that are the inevitable fruit of secular autonomy. I want to formulate a liberationist response to these objections. Liberationists do not see human and divine agency as fundamentally opposed, but rather the deepest strivings of (...) the human spirit for justice are on the same trajectory as the Kingdom of God. Human and divine agency are tied together through the notion of a utopia whereby these strivings for justice are expressed in a finite and historical way. This emancipative use of reason in the construction of a utopia provides a means for divine and human agency to interact without destroying the human autonomy of the secular sphere. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Religious Epistemology Through Schillebeeckx and Tibetan Buddhism by Jason VonWachenfeldtRobert MagliolaRELIGIOUS EPISTEMOLOGY THROUGH SCHILLEBEECKX AND TIBETAN BUDDHISM. By Jason VonWachenfeldt. T&T Clark: London, 2021. 240 pp.In his "Introduction," Jason VonWachenfeldt explains the "crisis of authority" experienced by many religious believers, and then commits his book (hereinafter RET) to a "dialogic negotiation" offering middle ways between religious tradition and postmodernity. The "dialogic negotiation" is between the brilliant but controversial (...) Catholic theologian, Edward Schillebeeckx (1914–2009), and the brilliant but controversial Tibetan monk (then ex-monk), Gendun Chopel (1903–1951). They both deconstruct the epistemologies of their respective traditions, but insist on the orthodoxy of their "middle ways."VonWachenfeldt opts for Aaron Stalnaker's methodology of "bridge concepts" (topics enabling interfaith comparison) and the comparison of two "historically situated" individuals (13). He names "religious epistemology" as RET's "bridge-concept," and to further facilitate comparison, three epistemological "categories" are posited: "perspectivalism, hermeneutics, and apophaticism" (64). Schillebeeckx's "phenomenological Thomism" constitutes his perspectivalist first phase, and holds that revelation includes both a "concrete-existential" and non-conceptual "implicit intuition" of the divine reality (32). There is an antinomy between the individual's act of abstraction and the "implicit intuition" of the "reality of God in Godself" (33).Chopel's negative way is more extreme. Chopel is a Madhyamakin but rejects Prāsaṅgika-Madhyamaka's version which affirms the "conventional validity" of the mundane. For Chopel, all formations lack even conventional validity but "common [End Page 404] beings" falsely affirm them (35). The few "noble ones" (the enlightened) are those aware of pure emptiness (understood as "absence," not "openness"). Schillebeeckx's second phase affirms that one is embedded in ongoing history and cannot escape mundane finitude. God must be seen as "mystery" active within it (45). Chopel's second phase extends the notion that an unbridgeable chasm exists between the conventional and the ultimate but that the Buddha can manipulate the mundane so the leap to enlightenment can occur (49). Schillebeeckx's third phase practices a "negative realist metaphysic": The individual encounters the "really real" external to oneself only by way of "glimpses negative in nature" (58). Chopel's apophaticism describes ultimate reality in terms of a "nonaffirming negative" (63).Next, RET treats the role of religious community in knowledge formation (67). For Schillebeeckx, our "non-divine finitude is precisely the place where the infinite and the finite come most closely into contact" (90). The later Schillebeeckx retains loyalty to the institutional Church but because of the finitude of language and human nature he deems it necessarily subject to critique (92). Chopel practices a "pious skepticism" (97), and increasingly satirizes institutional monasticism (circa 1934, he disrobes). Addressing the role of historical founders of religions, Schillebeeckx maintains that theology should shift from an unsalvageable truth lost in the past to the more eschatological language of "the [always] Coming One" (123). Jesus's epistemological authority does not reside in his ability "to supply answers" as much as it is to open up individuals to "a future reality in the making" (148). Honorific titles such as "Savior" or "Christ" as such are not serviceable. Jesus's story is an exemplar of how to construct meaning in our lives by the "praxis" of helping the suffering. Chopel likewise demythologizes Sakyamuni Buddha (151), but—unlike Schillebeeckx—insists he does so endogenously. For example, he enters the definitive/provisional (nītārtha/neyārtha) debate, but argues that all the teachings of Śākyamuni are both—they are definitive for those whom they help toward emptiness and merely provisional for all others (157, 158).RET's chapter 5 addresses the authority of personal experience in the apophatic knowledge of ultimate reality. How is it possible for "true knowledge" to be "primarily experiential in nature as distinct from being conceptually or linguistically based?" (163). Schillebeeckx holds that our very experience of human finitude brings us negatively in contact with the "unknown ultimate reality itself" (169). He maintains that the apparent lack of ontological contact between beings and ultimate reality (God) is "one-sided," persisting only from the side of our finitude and not from the side of ultimate reality: Though humans can never directly... (shrink)

Contemporary approaches to the study of suicide tend to examine suicide as a medical or public health problem rather than a moral problem, avoiding the kinds of judgements that have historically characterised discussions of the phenomenon. But morality entails more than judgement about action or behaviour, and our understanding of suicide can be enhanced by attending to its cultural, social, and linguistic connotations. In this work, I offer a theoretical reconstruction of suicide as a form of moral experience that delineates (...) five distinct, yet interrelated domains of understanding: the temporal, the relational, the existential, the ontological, and the linguistic. Attention to each of these domains, I argue, not only enriches our understanding of the moral realm but also provides a heuristic for examining the moral traditions and practices that constitute contemporary understandings of suicide. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Future of ReligionMark WoodThe Future of Religion. By Richard RortyGianni Vattimo. Edited by Santiago Zabala. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. 91 pp.In The Future of Religion, Santiago Zabala, Richard Rorty, and Gianni Vattimo provide contrasting and often complementary reflections on the future of religion after the end of metaphysics. They join a growing number of contemporary theologians, philosophers, and cultural critics who recognize that we are (...) presently undergoing [End Page 162] what may well prove to be the most significant turning point in the history of religious experience, a movement beyond the separatism resulting from absolutist and exclusionary religious claims. In addition to post-Enlightenment critiques of religion, the constitutional separation of church and state, and the retreat of religion resulting from, in Darwin’s words, “the gradual illumination of men’s minds” by advances in science, globalization’s world-transforming integration of individuals from diverse religious backgrounds into communities of shared interest and concern are further weakening the confidence with which any particular religious tradition may claim to possess absolute truth and, even more, fostering transreligious conversation and the formation of a postmetaphysical spiritual culture.The future of religion, writes Vattimo in Vero e falso Universalismo cristiano, lies not in “seeking the triumph of one faith over the others.” Rather we must “rediscover—after the ‘metaphysical’ age of absolutisms and of the identity between truth and authority—the possibility of a postmodern religious experience in which the relation with the divine is no longer corrupted by fear, violence, and superstition” (p. 26). We know all to well the horrific costs of failing to accomplish this goal, and today the union of religious absolutisms and weapons of mass destruction make our failure potentially catastrophic.In his introduction, “A Religion without Theists or Atheists,” Zabala notes that Rorty and Vattimo present a way of thinking beyond the ontotheological tradition that “consists of weakening and dissolving the ancient European concept of ‘Being’ and the very idea of ‘ontological status.’ This new, weak way of thought not only opens up alternative directions, it also recovers tradition: the relationship between the believer and God is not conceived as power-laden but as a gentler relationship, in which God hands over all his power to man” (p. 3). In the “Age of Interpretation” neither science, nor philosophy, nor religion enjoys epistemological or ontological authority over the other. The resulting “Gadamerian culture of dialogue,” which understands that “all positions are equally ‘valid’ because ‘of the lack of confidence in truth’ constitutes the greatest success obtained by the deconstruction of metaphysics” (p. 11). After metaphysics, “postmodern man, no longer needful of the extreme, magical reassurance supplied by the idea of God, accepts the probably that history is not on his side at all and that there is no power capable of guaranteeing him the happiness he seeks” (ibid.). Living without metaphysical foundations means affirming our ontological historicity, epistemological insecurity, and existential finitude. Rather than “search for truth,” says Zabala, we now “seek solidarity, charity, and irony” (pp. 17–18).In “Anticlericalism and Atheism,” Rorty articulates the historical movement to postmetaphysical thinking as one in which “philosophy professors began to stop asking “bad questions—questions like ‘What really exists?’ ‘What are the scope and limits of human knowledge?’ and ‘How does language hook up with reality?’” and began to focus on questions regarding how we can best practice solidarity, charity, and love (p. 29). Rorty’s description of our situation leads him to confess that his earlier self-identification as an atheist was philosophically mistaken. To deny the existence of God assumes one has evidence in support of this claim. But evidence against is equally empirically unavailable as is evidence for the existence of God. President [End Page 163] Bush, Rorty adds, is at least right about this much when he says that “‘atheism is a faith’ because it is ‘subject to neither confirmation nor refutation by means of argument or evidence’” (p. 33). The shift from atheism to anticlericalism is a shift from a metaphysical to a political stance, signifying Rorty’s commitment to challenging antidemocratic structures of power that legitimate their existence by claiming they have been ordained by... (shrink)

This is Warrior Yoga, New York Times bestselling author and retired Navy SEAL Commander Mark Divine's latest contribution to mental and physical achievement exercises started with 8 Weeks to SEALFIT and Unbeatable Mind. This is not your average yoga book. Using Coach Divine's signature integrated training curriculum, Warrior Yoga is an intense physical workout designed for both the nation's elite special ops soldiers, and the regular athlete with the heart and mind of a warrior. His tried and true (...) warrior sequences are designed to be simple and flexible. These short, powerful drills can be done from home or on the road to enhance existing workout regimens and cultivate new ones. The sequences are targeted and focused to adapt to any athlete's physical and mental capabilities including those rehabilitating from injuries and suffering from PTSD. Mark's decades of experience with amateur and professional athletes, active and aspiring Navy SEALS, and wounded warriors uniquely qualify him as an expert motivator and teacher. To be a SEALFITTM Yoga Warrior requires a harmonious balance between mental and physical toughness, strength, and agility. Mark's short digestible exercises will help any athlete hone their fitness routine to reach their fullest potential, combining the physical, emotional and spiritual aspects of an unbeatable mind and body program. (shrink)

The question of whether individuals retain interests or can be harmed after death is highly contentious, particularly within the context of deceased organ retrieval, retention and use. This paper argues that posthumous interests and/or harms can and do exist in the Konkomba traditional setting through the concept of ancestorship, a reputational concept of immense cultural and existential significance in this setting. I adopt Joel Feinberg’s account of harms as a setback to interests. The paper argues that a socio-culturally sensitive regulatory (...) framework does not necessarily exclude the donation of human biomaterials for transplant and science research. Indeed, when customary values are explored with open-mindedness and sensitivity it may be shown that such donation can form part of the important customs of some communities in this jurisdiction. Accordingly, a context-appropriate governance framework could utilise the cultural value of ancestorship as an incentive to encourage organ donation in the Ghanaian traditional setting. (shrink)

This paper explores Paul Tillich’s use of the Friedrich Schelling’s philosophy in his explorations of the relevance of historical forms of Christian belief to contemporary culture, where human experience is marked by anxiety and guilt, and where the search for ultimate meanings seems to dead-end in meaninglessness. For Tillich as for Schelling, religion points to metaphysics. The only literal or nonsymbolic truth about God is that God is the affirmation of being over against the possibility of nonbeing, a (...) divine Yes that is an overcoming of a prior No or self-inclusion. The ambiguity of existence as current human beings experience it is itself religious experience. (shrink)

What is “human being”? In this book, Thomas Langan draws on a lifetime of study to offer a new understanding of this central question of our existence, turning to phenomenology and philosophical anthropology to help us better understand who we are as individuals and communities and what makes us act the way we do. While recognizing the human being as an individual with a particular genetic makeup and history, Langan also probes the real essence of human being (...) that philosophers have tended to ignore. He argues that human being is the result of the experiences of humans throughout time—an ontological reality that not only incorporates our collective memories, institutions, habits, ethical practices, and religious faiths but also unfolds in time with its own history to inform individuals in the present. He provides tools and descriptions for accessing this broader historical and present-day reality, investigating deeper structures of human being to show how those historical roots can be appropriated and made meaningful. Building on Langan’s earlier works, _Human Being_ is also readily accessible on its own. Langan shows how the larger issues discussed in those books, ranging from the Catholic tradition to high technology, relate to being human while he brings to light new philosophical insights and ideas. Because human beings continue to evolve, informing our everyday understanding of the world, Langan shows how vital it is for us to think through the sense of human being and how great a challenge that is in today’s society. His work offers insight into human being that invites readers to think and live more deeply in their humanity—and to face the challenges of a rapidly changing world by reawakening perennial quests for love and the divine, and the very search for meaning itself. (shrink)

In this introduction to the philosophical study of religion Gwen Griffith-Dickson attempts to fill an important gap by considering these questions squarely in the context of the world's many religions and philosophical traditions.

The chapter approaches the hermeneutic concept of experience introduced by Hans-Georg Gadamer in Truth and Method (1960) from the perspective of the conceptual history of experience in the Western philosophical tradition. Through an overview of the concept and the epistemological function of experience (empeiria, experientia, Erfahrung) in Aristotle, Francis Bacon, and Hegel, it is shown that the tradition has considered experience first and foremost in methodological terms, that is, as a pathway towards a form of scientific knowledge that is itself (...) increasingly immune to experience. Science strives “beyond” experience because of the limitations inherent in the fundamentally contingent, singular, and negative character of experience: experience comes to us through unpredictable chance encounters and in singular situations and negates, tests, or “imperils” previous knowledge, thereby transforming it. By contrast, philosophical hermeneutics rethinks experience precisely in terms of these limitations. In the hermeneutic approach articulated by Gadamer and Claude Romano, experience is an encounter with the irreducible finitude and historical situatedness of one’s understanding and conceptual framework, an encounter with an otherness that puts our preunderstanding to test and requires us to revise it. Hermeneutic experience is thus a singular event that irreparably transforms us. (shrink)

Today’s philosophical thinking mostly deals with the problem of sin from a religious, phenomenological or ethical point of view. This paper is an attempt to find hermeneutical points of view for the possibility of an interpretation of sin which can be opened by philosophical hermeneutics with reference to our historical being, the linguistic form of experience and the experience of finitude. The train of thoughts takes us from the analysis of the concept “original sin” to the disclosure of (...) the speculative structure and existential meaning of the original sin. Throughout this examination, the essence of original sin is revealed as the medium and the universal experience-horizon of the history of human being and of meaning. (shrink)

The paper deals with the ontological questions related to tradition, especially focusing on Gadamer and Dilthey. It is argued that tradition should be regarded not that much as a limitation, but rather as an enabling finitude that gives access to reality. This ontological structure concerns several aspects of human existence, nomothetic science included. Historical background thus has an ontological impact that surpasses objectivistic approaches. A short discussion of causality in natural science traces the genealogy of the causal (...) scheme and compares the notion of effect with the Wirkung in the sense of effective history. In this context the difference between the modern scientific concept of nature and the natura of the elder tradition appears to be important in order to understand the specificity of Diltheyan philosophy of life. There seems to be a complementary relation between hermeneutics and philosophy of life insofar as both currents are trying to reinstall the modern subject in reality, Gadamers main concern being the historical incarnation in a process, profoundly marked by language and Dilthey still trying to save part of nature in history. These two aspects can be regarded as almost direct answers to the inverse Cartesian tendency to liberate the subject from its history and from its bodily nature. Experience and lived experience thus seem less contradictory than some passages in Gadamers Truth and Method would suggest. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Buddhist Goddesses of India, and: Goddesses and the Divine Feminine: A Western Religious HistoryRita M. GrossBuddhist Goddesses of India. By Miranda Shaw. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. 571 pp.Goddesses and the Divine Feminine: A Western Religious History. By Rosemary Radford Ruether. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. 381 pp.These two very large books should be of obvious interest to those concerned with Buddhist-Christian interactions and (...) comparative studies. They are also especially timely and important, given how much goddesses and the divine feminine have been [End Page 175] overlooked and ignored by those involved in Buddhist-Christian interchange and comparative studies as well as by serious scholars of both traditions.These books will function mainly as goldmines of information about goddesses in Buddhist and Western religions rather than as theoretical and theological analyses about what is at stake in the presence or absence of goddesses and imagery of the divine feminine in either tradition. As is well known, imagery of the divine feminine is longstanding and of considerable importance in Buddhist traditions, even though it was not part of the earliest layers of Buddhist traditions, whereas the divine feminine is largely absent in more recent Western traditions, even though it was common in the ancient Near East. Thus, these two traditions are mirror images of each other’s historical development concerning the divine feminine. It would be fascinating to explore this difference between the traditions. Because neither book is comparative in any way, such questions are not entertained in these books, but at least both books provide a great deal of information that others may use in future explorations of such similarities and differences between the traditions.Most of Miranda Shaw’s analytical comments are found in her brief, thirteen-page introduction. The rest of the book is mainly descriptive. Most of this discussion concerns her choice of the term “goddess” to refer to the many nonhuman, divine females found in Buddhist art and literature. She notes that, while mention of Goddesses is widespread and long-term in works on Buddhist art and history, Buddhist studies in general has not paid much attention to goddesses, and the same basic information has been repeated over and over, with few advances in interpreting and understanding these figures. I would agree with this assessment. She also notes, correctly, that Buddhist goddesses have received scant attention in the recent spate of Western scholarly investigations of goddesses and the divine feminine. Nevertheless, as Shaw points out, various kinds of divine females occupy every niche of the divine hierarchy in Indian and Buddhist cosmology. Indeed, it would be impossible to look at any book about Indian Buddhist art without noticing many voluptuous, highly attractive female figures as well as some more fearsome figures.Shaw justifies her use of the term “goddess” by noting that this is the literal translation of the term routinely used for female divine figures in Indian Buddhist sources. This justification is pointed at several other scholars who have written about Buddhist “goddesses” from a Buddhist point of view but who have avoided the term “goddess” for various reasons, but mainly because of the complexity and explosiveness of that term in Western contexts. The term has also been avoided by Western Buddhist scholars because of possible misunderstandings or confusion that could be caused by the use of such a theistic term in the context of non-theistic Buddhism. Nevertheless, Shaw is correct that the common translation of the terms used in Buddhist texts would be “goddess.” In her discussion of the term “goddess,” Shaw also justifies this English terminology by arguing that the “deities,” especially of Vajrayana Buddhism, are not merely symbols created by human beings or projections of human experiences but have another, transhuman reality. The metaphysics of “deities” or “goddesses” in Buddhism is, however, an extremely complex and subtle matter that cannot be adequately discussed in the few pages Shaw devotes to this issue. [End Page 176]In the rest of her introduction, Shaw details her main emphases in her book, “the origins, iconography, and religious roles of each goddess and discussion of her place in Buddhist history and practice” (p. 4). She tells... (shrink)

Some tradition historical perspectives on Psalm 83 Psalm 83 forms a poetical unit and is the well constructed poem of an artist. It could be divided into two stanzas which contains a cry for help (2), lament (3-9) and several petitions (10-19). This work reflects different tradition historical allusions. The use of prophetic language is immanent, while the faces of the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel are elusively present. Two episodes from the history of the Judges (Judges 4-5; (...) 7-8) are utilised to expose its independent function in this psalm. The occurence of a well known Canaanite tradition is further obvious, while the question into the psalm's apocalyptic relationships is negatively assessed. Single motives like the upliftment of the head (3) and the shepherd/flock image (13) fulfil a definite Junction within the psalm’s context. The poet clearly applied historical traditions, motives and images to express an independent function within its context. (shrink)

As much a doubter as a believer, Emily Dickinson often expressed views about God in general—and God with respect to suffering in particular. In many of her poems, she contemplates the question posed by countless theologians and poets before her: how can one reconcile a benevolent deity with evil in the world? Examining Dickinson’s perspectives on the role played by a supposedly omnipotent and all-loving God in a world marked by violence and pain, Patrick Keane initially focuses on her poem (...) “Apparently with no surprise,” in which frost, a “blonde Assassin,” beheads a “happy Flower,” a spectacle presided over by “an Approving God.” This tiny lyric,Keane shows, epitomizes the poet’s embattled relationship with the deity of her Calvinist tradition. Although the problem of sufferingis usually couched in terms of natural disasters or human injustice, Dickinson found new ways of considering it. By choosing a flower as her innocent “victim,” she bypassed standard “answers” to the dilemma in order to focus on the problem in its purest symbolic form. Keane goes on toprovide close readings of many of Dickinson’s poems and letters engaging God, showing how she addressed the challenges posed—by her own experience and by an innate skepticism reinforced by a nascent Darwinism—to the argument from design and the concept of a benevolent deity. More than a dissection of a single poem, Keane’s book is a sweeping personal reflection on literature and religion, faith and skepticism, theology and science. He traces the evolving history of the Problem of Suffering from the Hebrew Scriptures, through the writings of Paul, Augustine, and Aquinas, to the most recent theological and philosophical studies of the problem. Keane is interested in _how_ readers today respond to Emily Dickinson’s often combative poems about God; at the same time, she is located as a poet whose creative life coincided with the momentous changes and challenges to religious faith associated with Darwin andNietzsche.Keane also considers Dickinson’s poems and letters in the context of the great Romantic tradition, as it runs fromMilton throughWordsworth, demonstrating how thework of these poets helps illuminate Dickinson’s poetry and thought. Because Dickinson the poet was also Emily the gardener, her love of flowers was an appropriate vehicle for her observations on mortality and her expressions of doubt. _Emily Dickinson’s Approving God _is a graceful study that reveals not only the audacity of Dickinson’s thought but also its relevance to modern readers. In light of ongoing confrontations between Darwinism and design, science and literal conceptions of a divine Creator, it is an equally provocative read for students of literature and students of life. (shrink)

This article takes its starting‐point in the current resurgence of interest in negative theology. Being especially prevalent among postmodern thinkers, this interest coincides with a strong conviction concerning the absence of the divine. In the postmodern context the interest in negative theology leads quite naturally into a debate on negative anthropology, as humanity's increasing awareness of its own finitude appears to reflect a similar break with the metaphysics of being.To analyze the tradition of negative theology, the article goes (...) back to its prime architect, Pseudo‐Dionysius . By comparing him to an author who preceded him, viz. Augustine, and one who followed him, viz. Eriugena, the article aims at giving a ‘thicker’ description of his position by framing it historically. In doing so it draws two conclusions. It first shows that the connection between negative theology and negative anthropology is indeed Dionysian; as such it is rightfully pointed to in postmodern thought. In contradistinction to postmodern applications, however, Dionysius' interest in negativity is shown to reflect before all a desire to wrestle with the overpowering presence of the divine instead of concluding to its absence. (shrink)

This article takes its starting‐point in the current resurgence of interest in negative theology. Being especially prevalent among postmodern thinkers, this interest coincides with a strong conviction concerning the absence of the divine. In the postmodern context the interest in negative theology leads quite naturally into a debate on negative anthropology, as humanity's increasing awareness of its own finitude appears to reflect a similar break with the metaphysics of being.To analyze the tradition of negative theology, the article goes (...) back to its prime architect, Pseudo‐Dionysius. By comparing him to an author who preceded him, viz. Augustine, and one who followed him, viz. Eriugena, the article aims at giving a ‘thicker’ description of his position by framing it historically. In doing so it draws two conclusions. It first shows that the connection between negative theology and negative anthropology is indeed Dionysian; as such it is rightfully pointed to in postmodern thought. In contradistinction to postmodern applications, however, Dionysius' interest in negativity is shown to reflect before all a desire to wrestle with the overpowering presence of the divine instead of concluding to its absence. (shrink)

According to one antitheist argument, the necessarily omniscient, necessarily omnipotent, and necessarily omnibenevolent Anselmian God does not exist, because if God is necessarily omnipotent it is impossible for Him to comprehend fully certain concepts, such as fear, frustration and despair, that an omniscient being needs to possess. Torin Alter examines this argument and provides three elaborate objections to it. I argue that theists would not accept any of them because they con ict with traditional Judaeo-Christian doctrines concerning divine attributes.

This book explores religious epiphanies in which there is the appearance of God, a god or a goddess, or a manifestation of the divine or religious reality as received in human experience. Drawing upon the scriptures of various traditions, ancillary religious writings, psychological and anthropological studies, as well as reports of epiphanic experiences, the book presents and examines epiphanies as they have occurred across global religious traditions and cultures, historically and up to the present day. Primarily providing a (...) study of the great range of epiphanies in their phenomenal presentation, Kellenberger also explores issues that arise for epiphanies, such as the matter of their veridicality (whether they are truly of or from the divine) and the question of whether all epiphanies are of the same religious reality. (shrink)

This paper is based on a study of therapists’ experiences of working with suicidal clients. Using a hermeneutic-phenomenological methodology informed by Heidegger, the study provides an understanding of the meaning of therapists’ experiences from their perspective as mental health professionals in New Zealand. In this regard, the findings of the study identified three themes: Therapists’ reaction of shock upon learning of the suicide of their client; Therapists’ experience of assessing suicidal clients as a burden; and finally, Therapists’ professional and personal (...) crises as a result of their experiences and struggling to come to terms with events.The study sheds light on how the experiences of therapists whose clients have committed suicide can be understood. The findings show how mainstream prevention and intervention strategies result from the misrepresentation and misinterpretation of our traditional way of knowing what it means to be human. When therapists discover that phenomena are not necessarily what they appear to be, they feel unsettled and confused about their responsibilities and what it means to live and die as a human being. The study reveals that therapists experience a profound legacy of guilt, doubt and fear when a client commits suicide. Finally, the study proposes that the time has come for the profession to care for its own in order to allow therapist, in turn to care for (and about) the vulnerable other. (shrink)

In this thesis I investigate the notion of experience in German Idealist Philosophy. I focus on the exploration of an alternative to the transcendental model notion of experience through Schelling's insight into the notion of logogrif. The structural division of this project into two sections reflects the two theoretical standpoints of this project, namely the logic and the logogrif of experience. The first section - the logic of experience - explores the notion of experience provided in Kant's Critique of Pure (...) Reason, Critique of Judgement and Fichte's Science of Knowledge. I argue that Kant's fundamental question about the possibility of synthetic a priori judgements succeeds in thematising the aporia of cognitive experience but results in a subject-oriented, representational model which radically confines the notion of experience to the constitutive laws of the understanding or to the normative precepts of Reason. Experience is founded upon a sharp division between faith and knowledge, will and logic, desire and reflection, absolute and finitude. Fichte's endeavour to articulate a non-representational account of experience, does not succeed in extricating itself from the representational model, so long as experience is reduced to the ever-producing deeds of the self-positing ego. Despite the serious differences between Kant's and Fichte's notions of experience, both accounts, so long as they unfold from a transcendental standpoint, attempt to resolve experience into conceptual laws or determinations of the ego's absolute will. Experience is transformed into an object of the subject's cognitive or volitional faculties. The paradoxes of man's interaction with the world are intended to be accommodated either by the law-giving spontaneity of the understanding and the Architectonic of Pure Reason or by the overpowerful primordial act of the self-positing ego. This implies the conceptualisation of the self in terms of constant identity-through-time, or sheer self-determination. However, this conceptualisation remains at the normative or prescriptive level, which in turn is projected upon the world. The latter, though appears as the subject's property, essentially remains alien and opaque, confirming the radical limitations of the ego rather than its order-giving authority. Moreover, this notion of experience is ultimately founded upon a radical expulsion of the divine from the world, the de-spiritualisation of the sensual and the de-sensualisation of the spiritual, the sharp juxtaposition between absolute and finitude. This results in a self-defeating subjectivity, whose firm identity and rule-giving authority does not rescue it from its perennial unattainability to 'organise the conditioned' or 'conquer the unconditioned'. In Kant's and Fichte's thought, however, I detect elements that potentially transgress their transcendental account of experience. These are found in Kant's concept of spontaneity and free play between understanding and imagination, and Fichte's concept of productivity. I argue that these elements lose their potential dynamism, so long as they are absorbed by the transcendental demands for the solution of the aporias of logic. However, these elements point to the need for a radical re-conceptualisation of the notion of experience. This is provided by means of Schelling's logogriflic approach, which constitutes the theme of the second section. The second section - the logogrif of experience - attempts to articulate a different approach towards the notion of experience, through an exploration of Schelling's versatile and provocative thought. This section focuses on Schelling's original insight into the notion and act of logogrif, which opens the dialogue between logos and mythos, cosmic becoming and human soul, cosmic imagination and human reflection, faith and knowledge. This section attempts to illuminate Schelling's fascinating philosophical investigations and discoveries that have been rather overlooked, possibly, due to Hegel's overwhelming critique. This section, after a brief critical examination of the Identity Philosophy, attempts to elucidate Schelling's notion of experience through his middle works, Of Human Freedom, Ages of the World, The Deities of Samothrace, which are treated as a self-developing trilogy. Schelling re-addresses the aporias of logic not as part of Reason's self-interrogation but as part of the cosmic paradoxes and living experiences. In this way, Schelling resets the scene of the debate on the conditions of possibility for cognitive experience by putting on the stage the enigmas of the cosmos and life rather than the Tribunal of Reason. Logic itself is conceived as a potency in the cosmic becoming, and consequently can no longer attempt to establish the transcendental conditions for the possibility of cognitive experience. Cosmic becoming, in which man is an active part, is conceived as the process of the movement, the interaction, the transformations and transmutations of multiple potencies. These, far beyond any mechanical conceptualisation, appear as self-moving and yet interdependent, unknown yet familiar, inscrutable and yet manifest powers, describing the mystery of life itself. The latter is depicted as an ever-recurrent act of longing for self-expression as active unity. Experience is conceived as the lived process of a network of living potencies, which may not only resist rational powers but may also puzzle and seize them. In this context, reflection acquires a plastic dimension, as opposed to its rigidity in the representational model of experience. Reflection depicts cosmic longing's self-formation, whose man is part. This self-bending formation partially illuminates the nature of longing, and from this standpoint is the logic of the longing. However, this formation is movable, transmutable and mostly ineffable, and from this standpoint is the logic of a riddle: a logogrif. Logogrif is the transitive term that attempts to describe the transition of experience from its enacted phase to its allusive conceptual utterance, and in this sense the term itself participates in both phases, as both form of thought and form of life. The logogrific approach to experience in turn transposes us as from the realm of pure concepts to the realm of the mystery of life, from pure thought to acts of longing, from the Architectonic of Pure Reason to Cosmic Theurgy. The latter term attempts to grasp the paradox and dynamism of cosmic and non-cosmic becoming by means of multiple, vanishing and ever-recurring, transmutable potencies, or in Schelling's terms 'the magic of insoluble life'. Schelling's logogrific account consists in a powerful voice for the re-enchantment of the world, the introduction into the notion of experience of the imminence of the divine. This is not suggested in terms of the adoption of old religious doctrines but by means of the discovery and re-discovery of the theurgy of life, through the intensification of our artistic mood, the creative expansion of our deeds. This notion of experience allows for the reconsideration of the notion of the self, in terms of a dynamic, conflictual process between conscious and unconscious powers and the critical revaluation of the accounts of subjectivity which reduce it to the sphere of self-consciousness. The thesis concludes with the need for an investigation into the relation between logos and mythos, which only tangentially has been introduced by the present project. In this context it will be possible to re-appraise the potential that the logogrific approach opens for an alternative to both logical and traditional mythological patterns of thinking. (shrink)

German philosophers of the classical period viewed Spinozism as posing a threefold challenge: fatalism, atheism, and acosmism. This paper focuses on acosmism as a vantage point for understanding the resulting “Pantheism Controversy.” Drawing on insights into the ineliminability of indexical thought, I argue that Mendelssohn’s refutation of acosmism entails rejecting traditional theism: The finite world cannot be the product of an omnipotent creator. Schelling and Hegel recognize this consequence, but each responds in a different way: Schelling with a conception of (...) creative ethical individualism, Hegel with a conception of divine love and redemptive power to abolish the past and overcome fate. To understand these conceptions as a response to the Spinozist challenge is also to see how they themselves constitute a challenge to the Kantian Frame. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Divine Emptiness and Historical Fullness: A Buddhist-Jewish-Christian Conversation with Masao AbeEdward L. ShirleyDivine Emptiness and Historical Fullness: A Buddhist-Jewish-Christian Conversation with Masao Abe. Edited by Christopher Ives. Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1995. 272 pp.This book is a continuation of a discussion begun by Masao Abe in 1984, previous incarnations of which have been published elsewhere. In the present volume, Abe’s expanded essay serves as (...) the first part of a four-part book. The second part includes responses by six Jewish, Christian, and Buddhist thinkers. The third part is Abe’s responses to questions and criticisms raised in Part Two. The fourth part consists of critiques by Hans Küng and Wolfhart Pannenberg and Abe’s separate responses to each.Part One consists of Abe’s well-known essay, “Kenotic God and Dynamic Sunyata.” There are many issues that Abe raises in this essay, of which only two—his understanding of a self-emptying God and his interpretation of the Holocaust—raise any serious concerns among his responders. Abe begins his theological reflection on the self-emptying of God by focusing on the kenosis hymn of Philippians 2:5–11. Abe raises the issue of the kenosis of Christ from a moral to ontological level, asking whether the self-emptying of Christ in either the Incarnation or the Crucifixion can be understood apart from the self-emptying “nature” of the Logos itself. And then, upping the ante, he asks whether one can speak of the kenosis of Christ without also speaking of the kenosis of the God whom Christ reveals.Abe then turns his attention to the Buddhist idea of Sunyata and proposes that Sunyata, far from being either a static or merely negative term, is dynamic and positive. This, he believes, will help to distinguish the Buddhist notion of Sunyata from Nietzschean nihilism. Abe also writes of the place of human reason, free will, the concept of evil, and time and history in Buddhism. It is in this context that he addresses the question of the Holocaust, speaking of his own responsibility not in the sense of having been directly involved, but in light of “collective karma.” At the same time, he does not want to suggest joint responsibility of the victims in the ethical dimension, but rather that such solidarity is realized in what he terms “the most fundamental religious dimension,” this dimension being identical with dynamic Sunyata. [End Page 207]The second part of the book consists of responses by six religious scholars. The first two respondents write from a Jewish perspective. Richard Rubenstein begins by asserting that the Philippians hymn can be understood only in light of Paul’s Jewish-Christian experience of the Covenant. Next, Rubenstein turns to his primary concern, which is Abe’s treatment of the Holocaust. He begins by outlining various Jewish responses to the Holocaust and rejecting each of them. Like Abe, Rubenstein denies the continuity of the ethical and ultimate dimensions, and accepts ultimate reality as ultimate nothingness.Sandra B. Lubarsky also appreciates Abe’s concept of Sunyata, but for different reasons than Rubenstein. Lubarsky sees it as a healthy antidote to Jewish tendencies to absolutize the Jewish community, which has led to an idolization of the community. On the other hand, she questions the Zen assumptions that lie behind Abe’s treatment of history and justice. While there is a higher vantage point than the level of human understanding from which to understand historical events, this level is reserved for God alone and to pretend to that level is arrogant. Likewise, from a Jewish perspective, it is impossible to remove God from ethical considerations.Christian responses begin with those of Heinrich Ott, who argues that the proper locus of interreligious dialogue lies not in the discussion of doctrinal or philosophical similarities, but rather in similar psychological experiences. Ott finds something in Christian experience similar to Sunyata. From this starting point, he proposes a Christian understanding of Nothingness that encompasses both human interconnectedness as well as the interconnectedness of humans with nonhuman reality.Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki maintains that speaking of the self-emptying God revealed in the self-emptying Christ has... (shrink)

Human rights are often taken for granted, but "What is the basis of human rights?" This is no easy answer, De Xiao Weiqi, in his 2004 book of this difficult the problem. He considered the following four main theories: First, the external theory: the root cause of human rights outside the law, such as human rights divine theory; Second, the intrinsic theory: the root cause of human rights within the law - law positivism ; (...) three, rationalist approaches: human rights is based on rational intuition ; Fourth, experience-based approaches: human rights from human experience, especially experience the experience of injustice. He made ​​the first three theories are severely criticized, and to promote a fourth to experience-based approaches. This paper points out that although the experience of Germany and Xiao Weiqi theory have many advantages, but it is evidence of human rights legislation are vague and inconsistent standards of the Department, and its invention on human rights can not provide more solid foundation. In fact, these issues are perceived more or less de Xiao Weiqi, he repeatedly pointed out that the need for external to the human rights legal standards, I think the divine rights theory is to provide a basis for human rights may be one of the world. De Xiao Weiqi theory of divine criticism of human rights have a good reminder, but I think it still can not rule out the Christ-centered Christian contemporary human rights theory. Human rights are often taken for granted but in fact the origin or foundation of human rights is not an easy question. Alan Dershowitz tries to tackle this thorny issue in his 2004 book: Rights from Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights. He mainly considers four theories: 1) externalism, eg, the divine source of human rights theory; 2) Internalism, eg, legal positivism; 3) Rationalism, eg, the claim that human rights are founded upon rational intuitions; 4) Experiential approach, ie, human rights are derived from our historical experience of serious wrongs or injustice. He severely criticizes the first three theories, and defends the fourth. In this article, I will point out that despite quite a few merits of Dershowitz's theory; his criteria for the validation of human rights are vague or even inconsistent. His general stance of constructivism towards moral and human rights claims, moreover, are unable to provide solid foundations for human rights. In fact Dershowitz is to some extent aware of these problems, and he feels that human rights do need an objective external source, if only it is possible. I think the theistic worldview is indeed able to provide this objective external source. Dershowitz has raised a lot of good questions for the divine source theory but I argue that in the end they cannot exclude the possibility of a contemporary Christocentric theory of human rights. (shrink)

This article is divided into five parts. After a brief example in the first part, the second explains what historical sense-generation is about. The third characterizes tradition as a pregiven condition of all historical thinking. With respect to this condition, the constructivist theory of history is criticized as one-sided. The fourth part presents tradition as one of the four basic sense criteria of historical narration. The article concludes with a discussion of the role of tradition in the (...) historical culture of modern societies.Historical sense-generation is a mental procedure by which the past is interpreted for the sake of understanding the present and anticipating the future. This mental procedure is an anthropological universal in the cultural orientation of human practical life and will lead to a concept of the course of time as a necessary factor in the cultural orientation of human life.Today the dominant opinion in metahistory conceives of historical sense-generation in a constructivist way. The sense of the past is understood as an ascription of meaning onto the past; the past itself has no impact on this meaning. But I hold that the past is already present in the circumstances and conditions under which historical thinking is performed and is obviously influenced by it. This presence can be called tradition. Before historians construct the past they themselves are already constructed by the present outcome of past developments in the world. Thus tradition is always at work in historical thinking before the past is thematized as history.Historical sense-generation needs basic principles of sense and meaning. Using these principles transforms the experience of the past into a meaningful history for the present. Despite cultural differences, four sense criteria can be identified as basic for making historical sense of the past. One of the four principles is tradition. It is the most fundamental one upon which all other modes of making sense of the past are grounded. It presents temporal change in the human world such that the world’s order is maintained despite all its changes. Since the emergence of the so-called advanced civilizations, other types of historical narration have overshadowed the constitutive role of tradition. Historical narration has been supplemented by exemplary, genetic, and critical approaches to the past. Yet the traditional one has remained the most frequently used and is the most basic and popular. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Contemporary Varieties of Religious Experience: James's Classic Study in Light of Resiliency, Temperament, and TraumaSami PihlströmLynn Bridgers Contemporary Varieties of Religious Experience: James's Classic Study in Light of Resiliency, Temperament, and Trauma. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. viii + 227 pp. Foreword by James W. Fowler.Scholars of pragmatism have for a long time insisted that William James—like most classical American philosophers—is "our contemporary", a thinker highly relevant (...) to our problems, not only to the problems of the past. Theologian and scholar of religious education Lynn Bridgers argues that James's The Varieties of Religious Experience, in particular, is not only an historically influential treatise on the psychology of religious experience but a work which continues to speak to us, offering crucial insights to what religious life amounts to a century later.James might have enjoyed Bridgers's personal way of opening the discussion. In the introduction, she refers to her own conversion, her "heartfelt [End Page 454] encounter with the Divine", her own "powerful religious experience" (2–3). It is in the context of her own religious life that she finds it rewarding to return to James's discussion of the types of religious temperament and to compare his classification to contemporary psychological accounts of religious experience, particularly in studies of resiliency and posttraumatic spirituality. This certainly is one way of emphasizing that James indeed is our contemporary and should not be neglected in attempts to understand the place of religion in human life today. Not only is a return to James important academically; Bridgers also recommends that religious institutions follow James in supporting a "more varied range of religious offerings in recognition of documented varieties in religious temperament and development" (7).Bridgers offers an interesting selection of evidence, "1902 to 2002", for the existence of the three basic categories of religious temperament James distinguishes in Lectures IV–XI of the Varieties,1 namely, the "healthy-minded" prophet (ch. 4), the "sick soul" leading a monastic life in order to find unification for her/his "divided self" (ch. 5), and the "mystic" experiencing a dramatic conversion (ch. 6), before going on to explore, in her concluding chapter 7, some theological analogies of these categories (viz., the prophetic theology of Irenaeus, the monastic tradition as established by Augustine, and the spontaneity of radical "spiritual innovators"). Before laying out this empirically rich—and somewhat confusing—material, Bridgers introduces, in the first three chapters, James's basic themes and methodology (ch. 1), his pluralism and experiential perspective, as articulated in the Varieties and the works leading up to it (ch. 2), and the comparison of his conversion typology to recent empirical studies by Jerome Kagan and others (ch. 3).The author's own method is largely Jamesian: she quotes at length from the sources she finds illuminating, just as James does in the Varieties. Philosophically, the crucial parts of the book are the ones in which she interprets James's method (and, hence, her own) as "phenomenological". Surveying "religious feelings and religious impulses", or the "developed subjective phenomena" finding their expression "in works of piety and autobiography", James "undertook what today we recognize as a phenomenological description of religious experience" (6).2 The phenomenological method, for him as well as for Bridgers, is above all "experiential" and focuses on "extremes in experience", especially on the fruits of those experiences (8).This phenomenological reading of James—of James's ways of reading the sources he uses in the Varieties—could have been defended in a more detailed manner, although James's "phenomenology" has already been emphasized by others, especially James Edie, to whom Bridgers refers (8–9, 12, 29).3 In this context, it is natural to compare James's method with the approach known as the phenomenology of religion, represented by Rudolf Otto and Mircea Eliade, among others. These thinkers are mentioned by Bridgers (9), but she prefers to connect James with the main figures of the [End Page 455] philosophical movement of phenomenology, especially its founder Edmund Husserl and further developers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, plausibly arguing that James to some extent influenced these philosophers' method of describing experience directly "as it is... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sunyata and Otherness:Applying Mutually Transformative Categories from Buddhist-Christian Dialogue in ChristologySusie Paulik Babka“The universe is expanding,” the physicists tell us. “But doesn’t an expansion of something mean the presupposition of boundaries?” my naïve mind inquires, thinking too much in terms of discrete substances. Can “something” expand “into” nothing, “into” emptiness? Shot through with “dark energy” (the name an intellectual signifier allowing physicists to speak of the ineffable), the immensity (...) of the universe teaches a lesson in humility before mystery and the radically new. Dark energy makes up 74 percent of the universe and is responsible for increasing the rate of the universe’s expansion; it may be explained as the energy of empty space, or space devoid of matter and gravity. Although an unobservable phenomenon, dark energy penetrates the known universe as that which counteracts gravity’s relationship to matter, causing a negative pressure in regions of the universe devoid of matter to expand. Hence, the energy of emptiness is the reason for the universe’s expansion; emptiness is the reason reality is better described by rapid change and impermanence than stasis and immutability.While it would seem that these developments do not impact religious thinking, the Dalai Lama and others have argued that because science helps us understand the nature of reality, it affects the paradigm in which we consider the veracity of religious ideas. In his words, “if scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.”1 This is a bold statement, challenging both East and West to consider that when derived from only one source, even our most treasured religious ideas are narrowly conceived.The Western worldview has kept pace neither with the challenges of cosmic and subatomic physics nor with a more sophisticated global community. Since Parmenides in the pre-Socratic era, Western thought has been dominated by Greek philosophical categories, in which the perfection of beings is regarded in immutability and stasis, and things ideally tend toward independence or self-sufficiency. These categories [End Page 73] not only are inadequate to describe reality discovered through scientific means but also fail to articulate the meaning of the religious and cultural encounters taking place between East and West. Writes Joseph O’Leary, “The encounter with Buddhist thought enhances the hermeneutical task of theology, by opening up the possibility that Christian truth today can be more luminously presented in a discourse influenced by Buddhist analytical methods and ontological insights than in the old frameworks formed in dialogue with Greek ontology.”2Deconstructing substance ontology in the West suggests not only that science is a valuable conversation partner to religion but also that religions be conversation partners with each other. Christians should consider how divine or ultimate reality is manifest in other religions and abandon claims to exclusive truth. As Joseph O’Leary argues,The religions need each other, whatever their utter self-sufficiency on the plane of abstruse theological claims. The religions, as human historical trajectories, are inevitably marked by incompleteness and tragic failures. The tensions between them are not to be suppressed by dogmatic self-affirmation, but to be interpreted as the tension of “truth” itself, making itself felt within the finitude and brokenness of the human language striving to express it.3Truth for the Dalai Lama is “pursued by means of critical investigation,” requiring conversation with modern thought forms as well as both religious and secular Western traditions. If Christian theology is to be relevant today, it must continue to deconstruct the classical metaphysical categories that impede the appreciation of what is possible or true, especially in the encounter with non-Christian and non-Western thought, culture, and religious practice. Interreligious encounter necessitates the questioning of ontotheology, the classical metaphysical logic that refers to the rational basis for naming God, the supreme being, with supreme attributes, such as eternity, immutability, omniscience, and omnipotence. Ontotheology is related to the substance ontologies that describe the relation between God and the world and East and West in terms of dualism that according to Paul Knitter “so stresses the difference between two realities, so separates them... (shrink)

I do not for a moment question the fact that many people have experiences of a special type which may be termed “religious”, The extent to which religious experience may be regarded as a reasonably common phenomenon in present-day Britain is shown clearly by David Hay in his Exploring Inner Space, Harmondsworth 1982. that such experiences often involve reference to something which appears to display a radical unlikeness to all else and that they are therefore in some sense inexpressible. Doubtless (...) the ideas I have put forward about the possible source of such unlikeness and ineffability might suggest models of God which would not find much theological approval, at least within any mainstream theistic tradition, since some sort of pantheism seems inevitably to be implied. But however this might be, the concept of radical unlikeness as it has been analyzed here can, I think, help us towards understanding certain problematic areas in religion quite apart from the issue of intelligibility, which has been the focus of this discussion. To begin with, radical unlikeness suggests a way in which the historical continuity of concepts of the transcendent might be upheld against the discontinuity suggested by the diversity of interpretations through which they have moved. Ancient and modern outlooks on, say, God differ enormously, as indeed do the range of co-temporal accounts at many particular moments. But, by and large, theologians firmly maintain that it is a single and unchanging phenomenon which is being dealt with. Unless we can point to some common element which is both specific enough to create a binding sense of common tradition, yet never completely expressed by any attempt at understanding it within that tradition (thus persistently demanding new attempts to apprehend it), then given the widely differing views of God within, for example, the Christian community, it is difficult to see how we could assume that in fact they all stemmed from the same source and were talking about the same thing. The idea of radical unlikeness could provide an element with just these required characteristics: it could be seen as what all the accounts attempt to net, with varying degrees of adequacy, within their offered interpretations. It could be seen as what remains constant, constantly elusive yet constantly generative of fresh attempts to apprehend it, throughout a history of intra-religious diversity. This sort of explanation could, presumably, be applied to the intra-religious diversity of the non-Christian traditions too.Secondly, radical unlikeness might suggest a possible way of understanding inter-religious diversity in a way which allows that whilst such diversity exists, whilst the differences between religions are real, they are grounded in a similar root-experience. It may, at first sight, seem difficult to continue thinking of the various religious traditions as truly separate phenomena if they are taken as being grounded on experiences whose ineffability stems from the unlikeness of experiencing things as a whole. Here we must stress again that if they are to be considered intelligible, radically unlike experiences cannot be considered completely so - or putting this another way, we cannot more than approach experience of totality. Sense can be given to religious claims of ineffability by suggesting experience of near totality, where we reach the last point on the scale of inclusiveness which complies with the logical criteria demanded of something for it to be possible for us to be aware of it. We might thus attempt an explanation of inter-religious diversity based on the view that Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam etc. acquire their differences from the different elements included in their experience of near totality. Taking totality to be represented by the scale of one to ten, Hinduism might be seen as grounded on experience of 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-9-10, Buddhism on experience of 1-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10 and so on. The resulting dissimilarities are thus centred not on different types of experience, but on different areas of inclusiveness. This is, of course, to suppose that the various religious traditions are all based on the same degree (as opposed to the same elements) of inclusiveness, but it is by no means clear that such a supposition is justified. Continuing with our decimal analogy, might it not be suggested that whilst Christianity stemmed from experience of 2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10, Jainism was founded on a less extensive encounter with the divine (say 4-5-6-7-8-9-10)? It is, however, uncertain how we can compare and evaluate different religious traditions in such a way as to be able to comment on such claims. A definite danger of comparative religion is that by concentrating on establishing and exploring inter-religious likenesses, it may obscure the radical unlikeness of religious phenomena. It should be borne firmly in mind that such likenesses as may be established within comparative studies may not win religious phenomena a place within our understanding comparable to objects of more everyday concern. Statements found in the Old Testament, the Qur'an and the Vedas, for example, may, on occasion, be alike, but at the end of the day such things are often alike only, or chiefly, in so far as they display the same radical unlikeness in relation to the non-religious elements in our outlook.The analysis of radical unlikeness and ineffability which has been advanced might also suggest a way in which certain passages in religious writings could be understood, passages which at first sight can be seriously perplexing. If, for example, to return to the quotation given in the introductory section of this paper, we continue to think of accounts of the nature of Shiva as being attempts to describe some discrete, objective entity, then it is inevitable that either we will share the Puranic writer's puzzlement or that much of what we read about Shiva will appear as the muddled and extravagant thinking thrown up by an uncritical and over-fertile mythological imagination, consisting of little more than a hotch-potch of contradictory elements. But if we see such accounts as attempting to say something about everything, as symbols of near totality stemming from experiences which verge on the holistic, then what we read - with all its ambiguities - may become somewhat more meaningful. Thus W.D. O'Flaherty comments that Shiva “embodies all of life in all its detail at every minute” (Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Shiva, London 1973, p. 315). Similarly Alain Dani41ou sees Shiva, ultimately, in terms of his being "the supreme state of reality" beyond whom there is only "non-existence" (Hindu Polytheism, London 1964, p. 190).This analysis of ineffability and intelligibility seeks to introduce for debate a possible way of understanding the radical unlikeness which accounts of religious experience apparently attempt to speak about. It does not, however, claim to present an exhaustive treatment of the issues raised, on the contrary, I am conscious of many shortcomings and omissions. For instance, it remains to be seen under precisely what conditions something counts as being an elucidating likeness (presumably all experiences are, for example, temporal, yet temporality alone would not seem to offer a particularly elucidating comparison). Moreover, the degree to which appeal to likeness is allowed operation in actual accounts of religious experience needs to be explored. In addition, the notion of categorizing experiences according to the extent to which they approach a point of total inclusion requires careful clarification. To begin with, according to what criteria could we establish that one experience was more inclusive than another? However, such issues can only be mentioned here, any adequate consideration of them would require a separate paper.In conclusion, I would suggest that to use radical unlikeness and/or ineffability simply as devices by which to halt any process of investigation, proclaiming that the thing in question is not like anything and so is beyond all words, risks making unintelligible and placing beyond all further inquiry an important and extensive area of human experience. As William Alston put it, to label something ineffable in an unqualified way is to shirk the job of making explicit the ways in which it can be talked about. William P. Alston, “ineffability”, Philosophical Review 65 (1956), 522. It is surely more accurate to take ineffability as a “qualifier”I.T. Ramsey, Models and Mystery (Oxford 1964), p. 60. which “multiplies models without end”Ibid. than as an absolute which prevents the construction of any elucidating models. (shrink)

This chapter provides a brief historical overview of western philosophical views about human well-being from the eighth century BCE to the middle of the twentieth century. Different understandings of the concept of well-being are explained, including our preferred understanding of well-being as the subjective states and objective conditions that make our lives go well for us. While this review is necessarily incomplete, we aim to discuss some of the most salient and influential contributions to our subject. To that (...) end, we discuss some key views from ancient Greece, including the aristocratic values that were considered central to leading a good life, notions of personal and more expansive harmony as they key to well-being, and the idea that the experience of pleasure is all we should really care about. We also explain some of the major religious conceptions of the good life, and their progression through the middle ages and beyond. More recent secular conceptions of wellbeing, including several views on the importance of personal and public happiness. Finally, we discuss views to the effect that happiness is not enough for the good life and that we should strive for loftier goals. (shrink)

This book addresses two questions: "How is genuine future contingency compatible with divine foreknowledge?" and "How is foreknowledge possible?" Craig attempts to reconcile future contingency within the constraints of a Biblically informed conception of God. This volume, a companion to Craig's historical survey The Problem of Divine Foreknowledge and Future Contingents from Aristotle to Suarez, is in contrast to that study, is a synoptic and critical survey of the recent literature on theological fatalism. It discusses such intriguing (...) related topics as logical fatalism, multivalent logic, backward causation, time travel, counterfactuals, Newcomb's problem, and middle knowledge. (shrink)

The thought of Maurice Blondel has been read (representatively by Emmanuel Falque) as the theological aspirational movement of human action towards the divine, and therefore as the pre-emptive presence of the infinite to human experience. In this reading, absent has been the appreciation of an original Blondelian account of finitude as the essential experience of a human being-toward-death. Against this approach, this essay explores Blondel’s notion of human finitude as a ‘metaphysical experience’ of (...) the existentially revelatory function of death. To this extent, Blondel’s account of finitude positions the philosopher of Aix, beyond the usual contexts of twentieth-century Catholic apologetic philosophy, squarely within Continental philosophical proposals of finitude as seen in Heidegger, Foucault, and Deleuze. Blondel brings to prominence a French Spiritualist account of the positive value of endurance and resistance against death as the revelatory site of a finitude that is neither determined by an a priori closed boundary nor theologically overdetermined as an aspiration to the infinite. (shrink)

In Evangelium vitae, Pope St. John Paul II addresses euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide by striking a balance—maintaining the inherent dignity of all persons while considering the lived experience of those struggling to see dignity amidst suffering. Subsequently, a debate about the word dignity has led to clarifications from the President’s Council on Bioethics regarding different uses of the word. This essay relies on the work of the council, especially an essay by Edmund Pellegrino, to provide a basis for reflecting on (...) John Paul II’s approach to dignity in Evangelium vitae in terms of concept and lived experience. To further develop these insights, an alternative framework is proposed for thinking about dignity in the practical setting. (shrink)

I start from a relatively simple idea: the human being is constantly making a multiple experience of truth (once again, in reference to Gadamer's statement), both scientifical and technical, as well as religious or aesthetic. Still, what is the relationship between those experiences of truth? Can they express somehow, precisely by their multiplicity, a neutral ethos of today's man, or do they manage to take part in a larger and more elevated experience of truth? In the following paper I (...) will try to bring into focus precisely such issues. I return to the meaning given by Gadamer to the experience of truth. Then I make the distinction between the common sense and the proper sense of alternative. The later concerns the correlation - sometimes paradoxical - of different experiences of truth. For instance, the correlation between the technical and the religious experience. So one can understand that religious experience is above all an experience of human finitude. (shrink)

This article explores the religious interpretation of play philosophy across different historical periods and contexts, from ancient Greek thought to contemporary digital media. Drawing on the works of prominent philosophers such as Heraclitus, Plato, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Huizinga, as well as recent scholarship on digital media and religion, the article examines the role of play in shaping religious thought, practice and experience. It consists of three main sections, focusing on divine play in ancient Greek philosophy, the religious connotations (...) of the ‘playful order’ in the works of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Huizinga, and the transformative potential of video games as a medium for religious expression and exploration. Contribution: By synthesising diverse perspectives and examining the religious implications of play philosophy in various contexts, this study offers new insights into the relationship between the divine and humanity, and the significance of play in religious life. It also highlights the potential of digital media to provide innovative avenues for religious exploration, fostering a deeper understanding of the role of play in both historical and contemporary religious contexts. (shrink)