In this article it is argued that the apparent vagueness and broadness of the concept ‘spirituality’ and the difficulty in finding an agreeable definition for it are related to the different meanings of the concept within different intellectual and religious contexts and, subsequently, to different valuations of spirituality in relation to religion and lived religiosity. This article also examines the concept spirituality in the context of the psychology of religion’s historical entanglement with theology. On the one hand, the psychology of (...) religion has emancipated itself from theological discourse and theological institutions. On the other hand, the psychology of religion is still closely connected to a modernist theological project of founding religiousness in a province of the mind that resists religious critique of traditional contents and institutional structures in a secular era. The author pleas for more differentiation between theistic and non-theistic dimensions of the concept spirituality. (shrink)

Luther ist nur eine Stimme unter den spätmittelalterlichen Reformbewegungen. Die historische Forschung stellt die Lutherische Reformation inzwischen in den breiten Strom christlicher Reformbewegungen seit dem 13. Jahrhundert. Vor diesem Hintergrund muss auch das aufklärerische Bild von Luther als einem Protagonisten der Neuzeit revidiert werden. Die Vielfalt spätmittelalterlicher Reformbewegungen bis hin zum Trienter Konzil bildet zusammen mit dem Renaissancehumanismus ein reiches Reservoir an geistigen Aufbrüchen, von denen zahlreiche Beziehungen zur Moderne ausgehen. Mit diesem komplexen Geflecht zwischen christlichen Reformation(en) und Moderne beschäftigen (...) sich die ausgewählten Studien in diesem Band sowohl aus theologischer als auch philosophischer Perspektive. The contemporary historical research situates Luther’s Reformation in a much larger context of Christian reform movements that emerge in the late medieval and early modern period. Against this background the enlightened view of Luther as protagonist of the modern era is in need of revision. The variety of reform movements together with the Renaissance humanism compose a rich reservoir of spiritual reforms that will all influence the further development of the modern era. In this volume, this complex of the variety of Christian reforms relative to modernity is elaborated through exemplary studies from a philosophical-theological perspective. (shrink)

Foucault and the problematics of the will in Cassian and Augustine Although John Cassian and Augustine are contemporaries involved in debates on (free) will, sin and grace, Foucault in Confessions of the Flesh closely examines these two authors in different text parts without confronting their positions regarding their conceptualization of the libido and the problem of a sinful will. In this article Augustine’s and Cassian’s view of this problematics is elaborated as two positions in the same debate. It is argued (...) that Foucault, reading Cassian as a monastic author introducing new forms of submission, confession and meticulous hermeneutics of the self, undervalues the act that the demand of mortification of the will through unconditional obedience can be seen as part of self-practices and exercises of the will. (shrink)

In his 1959–1960 seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan states that one can only fully understand the intellectual (philosophical, ethical) problems Freud addresses when one recognizes the filiation or cultural paternity that exists between him and a new direction of thought represented by Luther. In this article Lacan’s interest in Luther’s theological voluntarism, his conception of God, his articulation of what Lacan identifies as the modern crisis in ethics and his view on the law in (...) relation to desire is presented and analysed. It is argued that Lacan is primarily interested in Luther as a religious author radically expressing the problem of the foundation of moral law and addressing the question how and where a person finds moral orientation after the break with the medieval Aristotelian-scholastic universal order and given man’s sinful desires. (shrink)

Early modernity is characterized by intensified and in-depth Christianization processes and the development of various models for religious subjectivity. Experiences of anxiety, despair and abandonment often play a central role in the religious literature and practices, notably in a protestant context in which there are intense debates on the place and value of such experiences in religious life. What is the relation between faith and despair? Can one distinguish spiritual despair from melancholia? What is the role played by the doctrine (...) of predestination in faith practices that include despair and desire? This book explores such questions through a reading of a variety of sources with the use of philosophical and psychoanalytical theories and perspectives: the life of Francis Spira, Luther, Calvin, Willem Teellinck, Gisbertus Voetius and Jean de Labadie. (shrink)

Working from an innovative perspective, this book explores the close relationship between Freudian psychoanalysis and the ideas of the early Reformation.

It has often been argued that Foucault’s turn to antique and early Christian care of the self, spiritual self-.practices and truth-telling (parrhesia) results from inquiries into the confession practices and pastoral power structures in the context of a genealogy of the desiring subject. This line of reasoning is in itself not incorrect, but – this article claims – needs to be complemented with an account of Foucault’s philosophical quest for freedom and for conditions, possibilities and modes of thinking and acting (...) differently vis-à-vis the normalizing regimes of power in science and, hence, in philosophy as an academic discipline. In this context a first turn to antique philosophy seen as a ‘way of life’ constructed through ascetic practices can be detected already writings from the late 1960s and early 1970s. Although indeed the project of the history of sexuality moved in a direction than Foucault had foreseen in the first volume published in 1976, earlier reflections on the need for free and critical philosophical thought relative to scientific ‘disciplines’ already prelude the later inquiries into care of the self, self-practices and parrhesia as productive for a critical philosophical attitude. (shrink)

Sigmund Freud's 1905 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality is a founding text of psychoanalysis and yet it remains to a large extent an "unknown" text. In this book Freud's 1905 theory of sexuality is reconstructed in its historical context, its systematic outline, and its actual relevance. This reconstruction reveals a non-oedipal theory of sexuality defined in terms of autoerotic, non-objectal, physical-pleasurable activities originating from the "drive" and the excitability of erogenous zones. This book, consequently, not only calls for (...) a reconsideration of the development of Freudian thinking and of the status of the Oedipus complex in psychoanalysis but also has a strong potential for supporting contemporary non-heteronormative theories of sexuality. It is as such that the 1905 edition of Three Essays becomes a highly relevant document in contemporary philosophical discussions of sexuality. This book also explores the inconsistencies and problems in the original theory of sexuality, notably the unresolved question of the transition from autoerotic infantile sexuality to objectal adult sexuality, as well as the theoretical and methodological shifts present in later editions of Three Essays. It will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and those with an academic interest in the history of psychoanalysis and sexuality. (shrink)

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

In this volume, renowned experts in psychoanalysis reflect on the relationship between psychoanalysis and religion, in particular presenting various controversial interpretations of the question if and to what extent monotheism semantically and structurally fits psychoanalytic insights. Some essays augment traditional religious critiques of Freudianism with later religio-philosophical theories on, for example, femininity. Others explore the relation between psychopathology and morality from the Freudian premise that psychopathology shows in an excessive way aspects or mechanisms of the human psyche that constitute our (...) subjectivity, moral capacities, and behavior.Contributors: Andreas De Block, KU Leuven-University of Leuven; Fethi Benslama, University of Paris Diderot; Sergio Benvenuto, ISTC, Rome; Gohar Homayounpour, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran; Felix de Mendelssohn, Sigmund Freud University, Vienna; Julia Kristeva, University of Paris Diderot; Lode Lauwaert, KU Leuven-University of Leuven; Siamak Movahedi, University of Massachusetts; Wolfgang Muller-Funk, University of Vienna; Gilles Ribault, University of Paris Diderot; Céline Surprenant, University of Sussex; Inge Scholz-Strasser, Sigmund Freud Foundation; Herman Westerink, University of Vienna; Joel Whitebook, Columbia University; Moshe Zuckermann, Tel Aviv University. (shrink)

In this short introduction, the guest editors present the main themes of the special issue.

This is the most comprehensive book ever published on philosophical methodology. A team of thirty-eight of the world's leading philosophers present original essays on various aspects of how philosophy should be and is done. The first part is devoted to broad traditions and approaches to philosophical methodology. The entries in the second part address topics in philosophical methodology, such as intuitions, conceptual analysis, and transcendental arguments. The third part of the book is devoted to essays about the interconnections between philosophy (...) and neighbouring fields, including those of mathematics, psychology, literature and film, and neuroscience. (shrink)

This article examines the methodology of a core branch of contemporary political theory or philosophy: “analytic” political theory. After distinguishing political theory from related fields, such as political science, moral philosophy, and legal theory, the article discusses the analysis of political concepts. It then turns to the notions of principles and theories, as distinct from concepts, and reviews the methods of assessing such principles and theories (e.g., the reflective-equilibrium method), for the purpose of justifying or criticizing them. Finally, it looks (...) at a recent debate on how abstract and idealized political theory should be, and assesses the significance of disagreement in political theory. The discussion is carried out from an angle inspired by the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Sur la toile de fond de la theologie negative, tissee par la discussion des apories que soulevent les notions de l'ineffable et de l'un, Damascius, le dernier diadoque de l'Ecole d'Athenes, elaboreson systeme metaphysique, sans se departir de la rigueur de sa methode aporetique, qui est une critique radicale du langage a l'interieur des coordonnees fixees par le Parmenide de Platon et par les Oracles Chaldaiques. Damascius, dans une enquete unique par son ampleur et son originalite questionne tour a tour (...) Porphyre, Jamblique, Syrianus et Proclus sur les principes; il examine les problemes que pose, en derivation de l'un, la formation de la trinite; de l'un-tout (la limite), du tout-un (l'infini) et de l'unifie (le mixte ou l'etre). Lien a priori entre l'un-tout et le tout-un, l'unifie est le principe de constitution de tout ordre et de toute realite. Damascius etudie sa nature de mixte originaire et autoconstituant, d'etre exemplaire et de premier intelligible. Cette notion lui permet de pas au crible, pour la mieux fonder, la problematique neoplatonicienne de la manence, de la procession et de la conversion. Les divers niveaux d'unification de la pluralite intelligible l'amenent a construire une theorie generale des elements, des parties et des formes Au passage, de nombreux textes, capitaux du point de vue de l'ontologie et de la doctrine de la connaissance, font regretter qu'ils aient ete inconnus du Moyen Age et qu'ils le demeurent pour beaucoup de nos contemporains. (shrink)

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. If we don't know what the words 'democracy' and 'democratic' mean, then we don't know what democracy is. This book defends a radical view: these words mean nothing and should be abandoned. The argument for Abolitionism is simple: those terms are defective (...) and we can easily do better, so let's get rid of them. According to the abolitionist, the switch to alternative devices would be a significant communicative, cognitive, and political advance. The first part of the book presents a general theory of abandonment: the conditions under which language should be abandoned. The rest of the book applies this general theory to the case of 'democracy' and 'democratic'. Cappelen shows that 'democracy' and 'democratic' are semantically, pragmatically, and communicatively defective. Abolitionism is not all gloom and doom. It also contains a message of good cheer: we have easy access to conceptual devices that are more effective than 'democracy'. We can do better. These alternative linguistic devices will enable us to ask better questions, provide genuinely fruitful answers, and have more rational discussions. Moreover, those questions and answers better articulate the communicative and cognitive aims of those who use empty terms like 'democracy' and 'democratic'. (shrink)

Herman Cappelen investigates how language and other representational devices can go wrong, and how to fix them. We use language to understand and talk about the world, but what if our language has deficiencies that prevent it from playing that role? How can we revise our concepts, and what are the limits on revision?

Barbara Herman argues for a radical shift in the way we perceive Kant's ethics. She convincingly reinterprets the key texts, at once allowing Kant to mean what he says while showing that what Kant says makes good moral sense. She urges us to abandon the tradition that describes Kantian ethics as a deontology, a moral system of rules of duty. She finds the central idea of Kantian ethics not in duty but in practical rationality as a norm of unconditioned (...) goodness. This book both clarifies Kant's own theory and adds programmatic vitality to modern moral philosophy. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Nietzsche's Socio‐Physiology and the Question of Sovereignty Nietzsche versus Liberalism on Freedom and Resistance Freedom and Resistance in Nietzsche's Later Thought On the Necessity of Conflict for Freedom: Nietzsche's Critique of the Subject.

The standard view of philosophical methodology is that philosophers rely on intuitions as evidence. Herman Cappelen argues that this claim is false: it is not true that philosophers rely extensively on intuitions as evidence. At worst, analytic philosophers are guilty of engaging in somewhat irresponsible use of 'intuition'-vocabulary. While this irresponsibility has had little effect on first order philosophy, it has fundamentally misled meta-philosophers: it has encouraged meta-philosophical pseudo-problems and misleading pictures of what philosophy is.

Contemporary society needs the recognition of a moral middle ground, where human behavior can be evaluated as permissible, understandable, or even valuable. As a counterforce to polarization and divisive politics, an identity model is proposed in which individual and group identities are transcended by a human and ecological identity.

In our book The Inessential Indexical we argue that the various theses of essential indexicality all fail. Indexicals are not essential, we conclude. One essentiality thesis we target in the third chapter is the claim that indexical attitudes are essential for action. Our strategy is to give examples of what we call impersonal action rationalizations , which explain actions without citing indexical attitudes. To defeat the claim that indexical attitudes are essential for action, it suffices that there could be even (...) one successful impersonal action rationalization. In what follows we bolster our case against an essential connection between action and the de se (or indexicality), first by developing a range of new action models and secondly by responding to challenges from Dilip Ninan, Stephan Torre, and José Luis Bermúdez . (shrink)

This text contains contributions from two Kant conferences which took place in Leuven and Cerisy-la-Salle in 1993.

Cappelen and Hawthorne present a powerful critique of fashionable relativist accounts of truth, and the foundational ideas in semantics on which the new relativism draws. They argue compellingly that the contents of thought and talk are propositions that instantiate the fundamental monadic properties of truth and falsity.

_Insensitive Semantics_ is an overview of and contribution to the debates about how to accommodate context sensitivity within a theory of human communication, investigating the effects of context on communicative interaction and, as a corollary, what a context of utterance is and what it is to be in one. Provides detailed and wide-ranging overviews of the central positions and arguments surrounding contextualism Addresses broad and varied aspects of the distinction between the semantic and non-semantic content of language Defends a distinctive (...) and explanatorily powerful combination of semantic minimalism and speech act pluralism Confronts core problems which not only run to the heart of philosophy of language and linguistics, but which arise in epistemology, metaphysics, and moral philosophy as well. (shrink)

An introduction to the field of historical theory, incorporating examples from novels, paintings, music, and political debates and using text boxes to provide focus on key topics.

Includes chapters that address the selection of disciplines and thinkers that are grouped into: religious thought; individual thinkers in the narrative tradition, and two noteworthy themes in the area of business thought (specifically, management and organizational behaviour).

Nietzsche's strengths as a critic are widely acknowledged, but his peculiar style of critique is usually ignored as rhetoric, or dismissed as violent or simply incoherent. In this book, Nietzsche's concept of the agon or Wettkampf, a measured and productive form of conflict inspired by ancient Greek culture, is advanced as the dynamic and organising principle of his philosophical practice, enabling us to make sense of his critical confrontations and the much disputed concept of transvaluation or Umwertung. Agonal perspectives are (...) cast on a number of key problems in his thought across a broad range of texts. Topics and problems treated include: critical history and the need for a limit in the negation of the past; Nietzsche contra Socrates and the problem of closure; Nietzsche contra humanism and the problem of humanity; Nietzsche contra Kant on genius and legislation; the problem of self-legislation in relation to life and temporality; Nietzsche's sense of community in its articulation with law, and the normativity of taste; ressentiment and the question of therapy in Nietzsche and Freud; and the problem of total affirmation in relation to critique. (shrink)

Cappelen and Hawthorne present a powerful critique of fashionable relativist accounts of truth, and the foundational ideas in semantics on which the new relativism draws. They argue compellingly that the contents of thought and talk are propositions that instantiate the fundamental monadic properties of truth and falsity.

The beginning of the twenty-first century saw something of a comeback for relativism within analytical philosophy. Relativism and Monadic Truth has three main goals. First, we wished to clarify what we take to be the key moving parts in the intellectual machinations of self-described relativists. Secondly, we aimed to expose fundamental flaws in those argumentative strategies that drive the pro-relativist movement and precursors from which they draw inspiration. Thirdly, we hoped that our polemic would serve as an indirect defence of (...) a traditional and natural picture concerning truth. According to this picture, what we call ‘Simplicity’, the fundamental structure of semantic reality is best revealed by construing truth as a simple monadic property of propositions that serve as the objects of belief, assertion, meaning and agreement. Our project was not a straightforward one. So-called relativists are not uniform in their key ideology, are often sloppy, casual, obscure or confused in their self-characterization, and differ in their argumentative emphasis among themselves and over time, thereby presenting a target that is both amorphous and shifty. This is an area where parties will frequently claim not to understand each other and where certain parties will sometimes accuse others of failing to make any sense at all. In such a situation, any effort to impose order will inevitably strike some parties as tendentious and unfair. That said, we felt that we had enough of …. (shrink)

I call the activity of assessing and developing improvements of our representational devices ‘conceptual engineering’.¹ The aim of this chapter is to present an argument for why conceptual engineering is important for all parts of philosophy (and, more generally, all inquiry). Section I of the chapter provides some background and defines key terms. Section II presents the argument. Section III responds to seven objections. The replies also serve to develop the argument and clarify what conceptual engineering is.