An extended illustration from Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception describes the interplay of habit, sedimentation, and intersubjectivity in the practice and performance of a skilled organist. This paper takes up Merleau-Ponty’s example in order to describe some of the phenomenological characteristics of embodied musical performance. These characteristics point toward an intersubjective event of “consecration,” as Merleau-Ponty describes it, in which the musician adopts the role of rhetor, inviting the audience into a shared dwelling place.

The rapid advancement of technology has led to an explosion of speculative theories about what the future of humankind may look like. These "technological futurisms" have arisen from significant advances in the fields of nanotechnology, biotechnology and information technology and are drawing growing scrutiny from the philosophical and theological communities. This text seeks to contextualize the growing literature on the cultural, philosophical and religious implications of technological growth by considering technological futurisms such as transhumanism in the context of the long (...) historical tradition of technological dreaming. Michael Burdett traces the latent religious sources of our contemporary technological imagination by looking at visionary approaches to technology and the future in seminal technological utopias and science fiction and draws on past theological responses to the technological future with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Jacques Ellul. Burdett's argument arrives at a contemporary Christian response to transhumanism based around the themes of possibility and promise by turning to the works of Richard Kearney, Eberhard Jüngel and Jürgen Moltmann. Throughout, the author highlights points of correspondence and divergence between technological futurisms and the Judeo-Christian understanding of the future. (shrink)

This paper examines a recent trilogy of books by Richard Kearney collectively entitled 'Philosophy at the Limit'. Kearney is perhaps best known to the wider academic world because of his publications on, and dialogues with, Contemporary European Philosophy. In the first of these books, On Stories, Kearney, in common with many contemporary thinkers seeks to push back the frontiers of philosophy to include all forms of narrative such as literature, film, theatre as well as other disciplines such as biblical studies (...) and psychoanalysis. What distinguishes Kearney's approach from others is that his writings embody a concern for the ethical. The second work, The God Who May Be is perhaps the more interesting of these books, philosophically speaking. Here Kearney sheds new light on an old question and challenges many of the traditional theistic conceptions. Finally, in Strangers, Gods and Monsters we have a contemporary reflection on the notion of ‘otherness’. In all, these three books contain an interesting and engaging presentation of some of the central themes under discussion in the continental tradition. (shrink)

Pushing past the constraints of postmodernism which cast "reason" and"religion" in opposition, God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, seizes the opportunity to question the authority of "the modern" and open the limits of possible experience, including the call to religious experience, as a new millennium approaches. Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, engages with Jean-Luc Marion and other religious philosophers to entertain questions about intention, givenness, and possibility which reveal the extent to which deconstruction is structured like religion. New interpretations of (...) Kant, Heidegger, Husserl, and Derrida emerge from essays and discussions with distinguished philosophers and theologians from the United States and Europe. The result is that God, the Gift, and Postmodernism elaborates a radical phenomenology that stretches the limits of its possibility and explores areas where philosophy and religion have become increasingly and surprisingly convergent. Contributors include: John D. Caputo, John Dominic Crossan, Jacques Derrida, Robert Dodaro, Richard Kearney, Jean-Luc Marion, Frangoise Meltzer, Michael J. Scanlon, Mark C. Taylor, David Tracy, Merold Westphal and Edith Wyschogrod. (shrink)

At the heart of the current surge of interest in religion among contemporary Continental philosophers stands Augustine’s Confessions. With Derrida’s Circumfession constantly in the background, this volume takes up the provocative readings of Augustine by Heidegger, Lyotard, Arendt, and Ricoeur. Derrida himself presides over and comments on essays by major Continental philosophers and internationally recognized Augustine scholars. While studies on and about Augustine as a philosopher abound, none approach his work from such a uniquely postmodern point of view, showing both (...) the continuing relevance of Augustine and the religious resonances within postmodernism. Posed at the intersection of philosophy, theology, and religious studies, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of Augustine as well as those interested in the invigorating discussion between philosophy, religion, and postmodernism. Contributors include Geoffrey Bennington, Philippe Capelle, John D. Caputo, Elizabeth A. Clark, Hent de Vries, Jacques Derrida, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Richard Kearney, Catherine Malabou, James O’Donnell, Michael J. Scanlon, and Mark Vessey. Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion—Merold Westphal, general editor. (shrink)

In 15 insightful essays, Jacques Derrida and an international group of scholars of religion explore postmodern thinking about God and consider the nature of forgiveness in relation to the paradoxes of the gift. Among the themes addressed by contributors are the possibilities of imagining God as unthinkable, imagining God as non-patriarchal, imagining a return to Augustine, and imagining an age in which praise is far more important than narrative. Questioning God moves readers beyond the parameters of metaphysical reason and modernist (...) rationality as it attempts to think the questions of God and forgiveness in a postmodernist context. Contributors include John D. Caputo, Jacques Derrida, Mark Dooley, Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, Robert Gibbs, Jean Greisch, Kevin Hart, Richard Kearney, Cleo McNelly Kearns, John Milbank, Regina M. Schwartz, Michael J. Scanlon, and Graham Ward. Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion—Merold Westphal, general editor. (shrink)

In this now classic textbook, Richard Kearney surveys the work of nineteen of this century's most influential European thinkers.

Study one: Between phenomenology and hermeneutics -- Study two: Between imagination and language -- Study three: Between myth and tradition -- Study four: Between ideology and utopia -- Study five: Between good and evil -- Study six: Between poetics and ethics -- Dialogue 1: Myth as the bearer of possible worlds -- Dialogue 2: The creativity of language -- Dialogue 3: Universality and the power of difference -- Dialogue 4: Imagination, testimony, and trust -- Dialogue 5: On life stories.

According to the received account of guilt in the philosophical literature, one cannot feel guilt unless one takes oneself to have done something morally wrong. But ordinary people feel guilt in many cases in which they do not take themselves to have done anything morally wrong. In this paper, I focus on one kind of guilt without perceived wrongdoing, guilt about being merely causally responsible for a bad state-of-affairs. I go on to present a novel account of guilt that explains (...) guilt about mere causal responsibility, according to which guilt represents part of the self as bound up with what is bad. (shrink)

The ways human behavior is conceptualized need to be refined. Major stumbling blocks have been the reification of verbal descriptions of behavior and the construction of ill-defined clusters of dissimilar problems. The effect of behavior-modifying drugs can be completely dependent on situational details. Behavior is a complex product of many interacting factors and cannot be rigorously predictable as the same behavior may be arrived at in different ways. Thus similar-looking behaviors can be functionally different and conversely different-looking behaviors can be (...) functionally identical. More answerable questions about behavior need to be formulated. (shrink)

The fact that Gilbert Ryle and J.L. Austin seem to disagree about the ordinary use of words such as ‘voluntary’, ‘involuntary’, ‘voluntarily’, and ‘involuntarily’ has been taken to cast doubt on the methods of ordinary language philosophy. As Benson Mates puts the worry, ‘if agreement about usage cannot be reached within so restricted a sample as the class of Oxford Professors of Philosophy, what are the prospects when the sample is enlarged?’ (Mates, Inquiry 1:161–171, 1958, p. 165). In this chapter, (...) we evaluate Mates’s criticism alongside Ryle’s and Austin’s specific claims about the ordinary use of these words, assessing these claims against actual examples of ordinary use drawn from the British National Corpus (BNC). Our evaluation consists in applying a combination of methods: first aggregating judgments about a large set of samples drawn from the corpus, and then using a clustering algorithm to uncover connections between different types of use. In applying these methods, we show where and to what extent Ryle’s and Austin’s accounts of the use of the target terms are accurate as well as where they miss important aspects of ordinary use, and we demonstrate the usefulness of this new combination of methods. At the heart of our approach is a commitment to the idea that systematically looking at actual uses of expressions is an essential component of any approach to ordinary language philosophy. (shrink)

Books reviewed:Mark BevirThe Logic of the History of Ideas.

Our aim in this paper is to present the distinct ways in which Wolff, Baumgarten, and Kant understand the relationship between necessitation, constraint, and reluctant action in an effort to illustrate the subtle ways in which their conceptions of obligation differ from each another. Whereas Wolff conceives of natural or moral obligation as incompatible with constraint, Baumgarten holds that constraint and reluctant action are, in some instances, compatible with natural obligation. Kant departs from Baumgarten by conceiving of obligation as necessarily (...) involving constraint: as Kant’s reply to Schiller’s famous objection reveals, obligation must take on the character of constraint to reluctant action on account of the fact that human beings possess inclinations that always threaten to impel them in directions that oppose morality. (shrink)

What is the relation between small-scale collaborative plans and the execution of those plans within interactive contexts? I argue here that joint attention has a key role in explaining how shared plans and shared intentions are executed in interactive contexts. Within singular action, attention plays the functional role of enabling intentional action to be guided by a prior intention. Within interactive joint action, it is joint attention, I argue, that plays a similar functional role of enabling the agents to act (...) in a collaborative way such that their actions are rationally guided by a prior shared intention. This understanding of joint attention – as having a key functional role of enabling the rational guidance of joint intentional action by a prior shared intention – allows for an alternative understanding of the kind of minimal cooperation that infants can engage in. On this understanding, infants’ capacity to engage in joint actions is already an incipient capacity to engage in rational and intentional joint actions, albeit a capacity that is necessarily scaffolded by an adult rational co-partner. (shrink)

An Essay on Human Action seeks to provide a comprehensive, detailed, enlightening, and (in its detail) original account of human action. This account presupposes a theory of events as abstract, proposition-like entities, a theory which is given in the first chapter of the book. The core-issues of action-theory are then treated: what acting in general is (a version of the traditional volitional theory is proposed and defended); how actions are to be individuated; how long actions last; what acting intentionally is; (...) what doing one thing by doing another is; what basic action is; and what omitting to do something is. Attention is also given to the concepts of causation, intention, volition, deciding, choosing, and trying. Finally, a libertarian account of free action is tentatively proposed and defended. (shrink)

Richard Kearney offers a response to the Scriptorium on his work and its relation to the poetic imagination.

This book proposes a way to think and speak about God in and through our contemporary, secular society, bridging the theist/atheist divide by considering the divine through the lens of aesthetics. It represents a timely contribution to Continental philosophy of religion that includes some of the most respected and important voices in the field.

This a clear and concise introduction to Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard.ichael Watts uses Kierkegaard's own writings to introduce his theoriesbout living a truthfu; and spiritual life, while explaining the enormousnfluence of the philosopher's personal life on his work and beliefs. As theounder of 20th century existentialism, and the first philosopher to definehe idea of angst, Kierkegaard's profound influence on modern life is clearlyefined in accessible terms in this guide for students and general readers.

This essay explores how Paul Ricoeur analyses the body as both flesh and text. Beginning with a phenomenology of embodiment and life in his early philosophy of the will, after his hermeneutic turn in the 1960s he concentrated more on the mediation of flesh through textual interpretation and language. This led Ricoeur beyond Husserl and Levinas and closer to the work of Merleau-Ponty. His later writing opens horizons for rethinking the ‘flesh of the world’ in new ontological and ethical ways.

This chapter reflects on sacramental ontology. It discusses issues such as the complex relationship between a phenomenology of flesh and hermeneutics of signs, between confessional “belief”, and pre- confessional faith. It also reflects on the question of hermeneutically retrieving Catholic and Protestant traditions in the light of a postreligious eschatology.

This article explores the crisis of narrative in contemporary culture. It begins by examining the challenge represented by the mass media for the continuing art of storytelling. Taking up Walter Benjamin’s warning that we are moving from an age of narrative experience to an age of instant information, it analyses the implications of the post‐modern ‘cult of simulation’ for education, historiography and ethics. The paper concludes by advocating a critical hermeneutic approach as the most apt response to this contemporary dilemma. (...) Only by means of such hermeneutic retrieval, inspired by the work of Ricoeur and Gadamer, can we avoid the current reduction of temporal experience to a ‘depthless present’ without past or future, thereby reaffirming the crucial narrative dimensions of historical memory and hope. (shrink)

Opponents of medically assisted dying have long appealed to ‘slippery slope’ arguments. One such slippery slope concerns palliative care: that the introduction of medically assisted dying will lead to a diminution in the quality or availability or palliative care for patients near the end of their lives. Empirical evidence from jurisdictions where assisted dying has been practiced for decades, such as Oregon and the Netherlands, indicate that such worries are largely unfounded. The failure of the palliation slope argument is nevertheless (...) instructive with respect to how slippery slope arguments can be appraised without having to await post-facto evidence regarding the effects of a proposed change in public policy. Close attention in particular to the norms operative in a given institution and how changes to policy will interact with those norms enable slippery slopes to be credibly appraised. (shrink)

What is the relation between joint attention and common knowledge? On the one hand, the relation seems tight: the easiest and most reliable way of knowing something in common with another is for you and that other to be attentively aware of what you are together experiencing. On the other hand, they couldn’t seem further apart: joint attention is a mere perceptual phenomena that infants are capable of engaging in from nine months of age, whereas common knowledge is a cognitive (...) phenomenon involving (so it seems) complex, overlapping metarepresentational states that require the kind of sophisticated mindreading skills that developmental psychology has shown to be beyond the capabilities of young children. In 'The Shared World: Perceptual Common Knowledge, Demonstrative Communication, and Shared Social Space', Axel Seemann attempts, inter alia, to makensense of this conundrum. (shrink)

We ordinarily suppose that there is a difference between having and failing to exercise a rational capacity on the one hand, and lacking a rational capacity altogether on the other. This is crucial for our allocations of responsibility. Someone who has but fails to exercise a capacity is responsible for their failure to exercise their capacity, whereas someone who lacks a capacity altogether is not. However, as Gary Watson pointed out in his seminal essay ’Skepticism about Weakness of Will’, the (...) idea of an unexercised capacity is much more difficult to make sense of than it initially appears. The aim of ’Rational Capacities’ is to provide the needed explication of this idea. (shrink)

The problem with authenticity—the idea of being “true to one’s self”—is that its somewhat checkered reputation garners a complete range of favorable and unfavorable reactions. In educational settings, authenticity is lauded as one of the top two traits students desire in their teachers. Yet, authenticity is criticized for its tendency towards narcissism and self-entitlement. So, is authenticity a good or a bad thing? The purpose of this article is to develop an intimate understanding of authenticity by investigating its current interpretation (...) and criticisms, its struggle with narcissism and relation to freedom. Examining authenticity as multilayered self-exploration reveals a composite of understanding, care, and acceptance. While a side current of acceptable tension shifts our understanding of authenticity from the security of self-determination to the messy interplay involved in being “true to one’s self” and being “in-the-world”. (shrink)

Drawing on work of the past decade, this volume brings together articles from the philosophy, history, and sociology of science, and many other branches of the biological sciences. The volume delves into the latest theoretical controversies as well as burning questions of contemporary social importance. The issues considered include the nature of evolutionary theory, biology and ethics, the challenge from religion, and the social implications of biology today (in particular the Human Genome Project).

Ethical debates about assisted dying typically assume that only medical professionals should be able to provide patients with assisted dying. This assumption partially rests on the unstated principle that assisted dying providers may not be motivated by pecuniary considerations. Here I outline and defend a mixed provider model of assisted dying provision that contests this principle. Under this model, medically competent non-physician professionals could receive fees for providing assisted dying under the same terms and conditions as physicians can in those (...) juris- dictions where medically assisted dying is lawful. The mixed provider model blunts objections to assisted dying rooted in supposed clashes with medical values. In addition to generating a market likely to expand access to assisted dying, the mixed provider model would not create markets that are unjust because they are “noxious” in Satz’ sense or because they raise “semiotic” concerns about the value of human life. (shrink)

The third edition of a work that defines the field of cognitive neuroscience, with extensive new material including new chapters and new contributors.

With his writings on phenomenology, psychoanalysis, Marxism, ideology, and religion, Paul Ricoeur has single-handedly redefined and revitalized the hermeneutic tradition. _From Text to Action_ is an essential companion to the now classic_ The Conflict of Interpretation_s. Here, Ricoeur continues and extends his project of constructing a general theory of interpretation, positioning his work in relation to its own philosophical background: Hegel, Husserl, Gadamer, and Weber. He also responds to contemporary figures like K.O. Apel and Jürgen Habermas, connecting his own theorization (...) of ideology to their version of ideology critique. (shrink)