By carefully considering Galileo’s letters to Castelli and Christina, we argue that his position regarding the relationship between Scripture and science is not only of historical importance, but continues to stand as a perspective worth taking seriously in the context of contemporary philosophical debates. In particular, we contend that there are at least five areas of contemporary concern where Galileo’s arguments are especially relevant: (1) the supposed conflict between science and religion, (2) the status and stakes of evidence, (3) the (...) question of biblical infallibility in light of scientific progress, (4) metaphorical approaches to biblical hermeneutics, and (5) possible dialogical constraints on public discourse. (shrink)

History begins inseparably with the birth of the polis and of philosophy. Both represent a unity in strife. History is life that no longer takes itself for granted. To speak, then, of the meaning of history is not to tell a story with a projected happy or unhappy ending, as Western civilization has hoped, at least since the French Revolution. History's meaning is the meaning of the struggle in which being both reveals and conceals itself. Technological society represents both the (...) triumph of historicity and its implosion, since here humans turn from reaching for the sacrum imperium - life lived in the perspective of truth and justice - to the mundane satisfaction of mundane needs, to life lived for the sake of catering to life. (shrink)

Yule, Valerie Review(s) of: Heroes and heretics: A political history of western thought, by Barrows Dunham, Publisher, Alfred A. Knopf in 1964.

First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This ambitious study presents Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) as the most outstanding and influential thinker of modernity--and examines the question of whether he was the "first secular Jew." A number-one bestseller in Israel, Spinoza and Other Heretics is made up of two volumes--The Marrano of Reason and The Adventures of Immanence offered as a set and also separately. Yirmiyahu Yovel, Professor of Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, shows how Spinoza grounded a philosophical revolution in a radically new principle--the (...) philosophy of immanence, or the idea that this world is all there is--and how he thereby anticipated secularization, the Enlightenment, the disintegration of ghetto life, and the rise of natural science and the liberal-democratic state. The Marrano of Reason The Marrano of Reason finds the origins of the idea of immanence in the culture of Spinoza's Marrano ancestors, Jews in Spain and Portugal who had been forcibly converted to Christianity. Yovel uses their fascinating story to show how the crypto-Jewish life they maintained in the face of the Inquisition mixed Judaism and Christianity in ways that undermined both religions and led to rational skepticism and secularism. He identifies Marrano patterns that recur in Spinoza in a secularized context: a "this-worldly" disposition, a split religious identity, an opposition between inner and outer life, a quest for salvation outside official doctrines, and a gift for dual language and equivocation. This same background explains the drama of the young Spinoza's excommunication from the Jewish community in his native Amsterdam. Convention portrays the Amsterdam Jews as narrow-minded and fanatical, but in Yovel's vivid account they emerge as highly civilized former Marranos with cosmopolitan leanings, struggling to renew their Jewish identity and to build a "new Jerusalem" in the Netherlands. (shrink)

In this short piece I am not undertaking to give a full discussion of the whole of Patočka’s “heretical” work. I wish only make clear its most essential core. What, in Patočka’s view, made Europe Europe and what is Europe’s bequest to the world after what Patočka describes as its fall, completed by the two world wars? What should Europe look to conserve in itself if- as seems likely - it would like to once again play a respected role in (...) world events? Is there something which the globalised world should take over from old Europe, or something which it should eschew, if it does not wish history to end and utter decadence to ensue? (shrink)

Despite the continued interest of researchers from different eras to the problem of the emergence and spread of heretical teachings in Kievan Rus, a number of issues remain insufficiently covered. In particular, the issue of the origins and spread of those heretical teachings that contributed to the development of iconoclastic ideas is worthy of particular attention. In the proposed article, we will look at the most influential heretical currents that penetrated the territory of Kievan Rus with Christianity and began to (...) spread, finding favorable conditions for its development here. (shrink)

Jan Patočka’s account of responsibility, as developed in Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, is configured through the philosopher’s entire model of history, seen less as a scale of progress, but rather as a rupture. Responsibility is possible only for a very specific form of humanity, centered on history, problematicity and selfdisclosure. This type of historic humanity is in profound contrast with the prehistoric one, focused on “daimonic participation.” Responsibility involves the passage from prehistory to history. Despite the fact (...) that it requires an intense “discipline of the soul,” the passage to responsibility cannot become pure and transparent, which in turn means that history is repeatedly threatened by falling back into prehistory. The positive involved in this assumption is that responsibility is not taken for granted; it is not a matter of following metaphysical principles, but rather a matter of a practical, “heretical” decision of embracing history, with its shaken problematicity, and of resisting the temptation of prehistory.La comprensión de Jan Patočka de la responsabilidad, tal como se desarrolladen Ensayos eréticos de filosofía de la Historia, viene configurada por el modelo completo de Historia, vista más como una ruptura que como una escala de progreso. La responsabilidad es posible sólo para una forma muy concreta de humanidad, centrada en la historia, la problematicidad y el autodescubrimiento. Este tipo de humanidad histórica se halla en profundo contraste con el tipo prehistórico, focalizado sobre la “participación demónica”. La responsabilidad implica el tránsito de la prehistoria a la historia. Pese a requerir una intensa “disciplina del alma”, el tránsito a la responsabilidad no puede tornarse puro y transparente, lo que a su vez significa que la historia está constantemente amenzada por una recaída en la prehistoria. El lado positivo que esta asunción envuelve es que la responsabilidad no se da por garantizada; no es una cuestión de seguir principios metafísicos, sino más bien cuestión de una decisión práctica, “herética”, de abrazar la historia, con su problematicidad conmovida, y de resistir la tentación de la prehistoria. (shrink)

This book offers a historical introduction to fundamental questions in the philosophy of religion. It is divided into twenty-five chapters. The first chapter discusses the nature of piety drawing on Plato's Euthyphro. The next three chapters discuss the nature of evil, free will, foreknowledge, and sin in the context of Augustine's On Free Choice of Will. Chapter Five discusses Anslem's "ontological" argument for the existence of God. Chapter Six explores Ibn Sina's account of the nature of the soul and immortality. (...) The next two chapters explore the foundations of religious belief and mysticism in the company of al-Ghazali's The Rescuer from Error. Chapters nine through eleven discuss Aquinas's arguments for the existence of God as well as his account of God's impersonal and personal attributes. The twelfth chapter explores Marguerite Porete's account of mystical ascent as well as the doctrines of heaven and hell. Chapter Thirteen discusses Pascal's pragmatic argument for belief in the existence of God. Chapters Fourteen through Sixteen discuss Spinoza's understanding of God, our relationship to God, and the foundations of morality. Chapters Seventeen through Nineteen explore the argument from design, the existence of God, deism, and the problem of evil. Chapter Twenty investigates Mary Shepherd's defense of belief in miracles, while Chapter Twenty-One explores Mill's views on the utility of religion. Finally, chapters Twenty-Three through Twenty-Five explore the origins of modern morality and the relationship between religion and nihilism in the company of Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality. (shrink)

This ambitious study presents Baruch Spinoza as the most outstanding and influential thinker of modernity--and examines the question of whether he was the "first secular Jew." A number-one bestseller in Israel, Spinoza and Other Heretics is made up of two volumes--The Marrano of Reason and The Adventures of Immanence. Yirmiyahu Yovel shows how Spinoza grounded a philosophical revolution in a radically new principlethe philosophy of immanence, or the idea that this world is all there is--and how he thereby anticipated (...) secularization, the Enlightenment, the disintegration of ghetto life, and the rise of natural science and the liberal-democratic state.The Adventures of ImmanenceHere Yovel discloses the presence of Spinoza's philosophical revolution in the work of later thinkers who helped shape the modern mind. He claims it is no accident that some of the most unorthodox and innovative figures in the past two centuries--including Goethe, Kant, Hegel, Heine, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Einstein--were profoundly influenced by Spinoza and shared his view that immanent reality is the only source of valid social and political norms and that recognizing this fact is necessary for human liberation.But what is immanent reality, and how is liberation to be construed? In a work that constitutes a retelling of much of Western intellectual history, Yovel analyzes the rival answers given to these questions and, in so doing, provides a fresh view of a wide range of individual thinkers. (shrink)

Introduction -- Against house arrest -- Digital impressions: writing memory after Agnès Varda -- Folding time: toward a new theory of montage -- Archiving disappearance: from Michelangelo Antonioni to new media.

First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

An entertaining, enlightening, and humorous graphic narrative of the dangerous thinkers who laid the foundation of modern thought This entertaining and enlightening graphic narrative tells the exciting story of the seventeenth-century thinkers who challenged authority—sometimes risking excommunication, prison, and even death—to lay the foundations of modern philosophy and science and help usher in a new world. With masterful storytelling and color illustrations, Heretics! offers a unique introduction to the birth of modern thought in comics form—smart, charming, and often funny. (...) These contentious and controversial philosophers—from Galileo and Descartes to Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, and Newton—fundamentally changed the way we look at the world, society, and ourselves, overturning everything from the idea that the Earth is the center of the cosmos to the notion that kings have a divine right to rule. More devoted to reason than to faith, these thinkers defended scandalous new views of nature, religion, politics, knowledge, and the human mind. Heretics! tells the story of their ideas, lives, and times in a vivid new way. Crisscrossing Europe as it follows them in their travels and exiles, the narrative describes their meetings and clashes with each other—as well as their confrontations with religious and royal authority. It recounts key moments in the history of modern philosophy, including the burning of Giordano Bruno for heresy, Galileo's house arrest for defending Copernicanism, Descartes's proclaiming cogito ergo sum, Hobbes's vision of the "nasty and brutish" state of nature, and Spinoza's shocking Theological-Political Treatise. A brilliant account of one of the most brilliant periods in philosophy, Heretics! is the story of how a group of brave thinkers used reason and evidence to triumph over the authority of religion, royalty, and antiquity. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper examines a relationship between heresy and utopianism forged in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century socialist histories to reveal a significant, pervasive fault-line in the ideological construction of anarchism. It first looks at Marxist narratives which trace the lineages of socialism back to medieval religious dissent and argues that a sympathetic assessment of European heretical movements was qualified by a critique of utopianism, understood as the rejection of materialist ‘science’. It then argues that strands of this narrative have been (...) woven into anarchism, looking at three examples: E.V. Zenker’s Anarchism (1897), James Joll’s The Anarchists (1964/1979) and Saul Newman’s From Bakunin to Lacan (2001). The dominant theme is that anarchism promises the transformation of corrupted nature and aims to achieve it though ecstatic violence, cataclysmic revolution and future perfection. Although this Millenarian anarchism is a ‘straw man’, rather than jettison ‘heresy’ as an investigative tool, I prefer an alternative conception of heresy derived from Martin Buber’s analysis of utopianism in Paths in Utopia (1949) and Michael Bakunin’s critique of political theology. I relate utopianism to the rejection of perfection and heresy with faith. By reframing of heresy in this way I seek to correct a long-standing distortion of anarchist ideas. (shrink)

By carefully considering Galileo’s letters to Castelli and Christina, we argue that his position regarding the relationship between Scripture and science is not only of historical importance, but continues to stand as a perspective worth taking seriously in the context of contemporary philosophical debates. In particular, we contend that there are at least five areas of contemporary concern where Galileo’s arguments are especially relevant: (1) the supposed conflict between science and religion, (2) the status and stakes of evidence, (3) the (...) question of biblical infallibility in light of scientific progress, (4) metaphorical approaches to biblical hermeneutics, and (5) possible dialogical constraints on public discourse. (shrink)

Richard Goldschmidt famously rejected the notion of atomic and corpuscular genes, arranged on the chromosome like beads-on-a-string. I provide an exegesis of Goldschmidt’s intuition by analyzing his repeated and extensive use of metaphorical language and analogies in his attempts to convey his notion of the nature of the genetic material and specifically the significance of chromosomal pattern. The paper concentrates on Goldschmidt’s use of metaphors in publications spanning 1940-1955. -/- .

This paper presents Christian Wolff’s claim that philosophy, undertaken on the basis of a proper method, cannot contradict revealed religion. The paper first provides a context of Wolff’s banishment from Halle for holding views in conflict with religious doctrines. Next, it proceeds, on the basis of Wolff’s Discursus præliminaris de philosophia in genere prefixed to his 1728 Latin Logic, to explain the principles of Wolff’s method, and to show how his conception of method enables him to disallow the possibility of (...) a genuine conflict between philosophical and religious dogmas. For Wolff, doctrinal conflicts between philosophy and revealed religion can only occur as a result of terminological disagreements, disagreements between dogmas and hypotheses, or disagreements between dogmas and theological misinterpretations. The actual conflict of dogmas, understood as religious or philosophical truths, Wolff holds to be impossible. (shrink)

I argue that Jan Patočka’s phenomenology can be understood as a kind of questioning philosophy that preserves the work and thought of Edmund Husserl by holding it in hindsight. Following Martin Heidegger’s lead to take up Husserl’s phenomenological questions more than Husserl’s answers, Patočka further develops Heidegger’s strategy with the addition of heresy: the philosophical process of distinguishing traditional questions from their answers in such a way as to preserve both, the original wonder sourced in questioning as well as the (...) specific answers that compose tradition. As excellent answers can tend to eclipse the powerful dynamism of original questions, heretical philosophy is revealed to be Patočka’s way to take up, modify, and enact Husserl’s motto “to the [questions] themselves!” In this way, Patočka’s further develops phenomenology while at the same time throwing a thinker back onto phenomenology’s central questions. (shrink)

The Schopenhauer-Schule was a group of original and diverse thinkers working in the wake of a common inspiration. This paper elucidates Nietzsche’s relationship with these thinkers specifically as concerns their intertwined theories of will. It shows that despite his efforts to suppress and ridicule them, Nietzsche was influenced by the Schopenhauer-Schule and adopted several of their alterations to Schopenhauer. But it will also show that Nietzsche was a heretical member of this school in the sense that his theory of will (...) was not only different from theirs but also subversive. Whereas each member of the Schopenhauer-Schule posits a realist ontology of will, Nietzsche’s perspectivism undercuts the possibility of their ontological realism and puts in its place a semiotical system of expression. As a result of this contextualized framework, Nietzsche’s will to power is revealed, not as an intended reference to a real “thing” in the world, but as a symbol that expresses his perspective about an unknowable reality. (shrink)

From the legendary inventor Daedalus to Goethe's tragic Faust, from the automata-making magicians of E.T.A Hoffmann to Mary Shelley's Victor Frankenstein – ...

There was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews: the same came to Jesus by night…John 3: 1–2A lady asked the famous Lord Shaftesbury what religion he was of. He answered the religion of wise men. She asked, what was that? He answered, wise men never tell.Diary of Viscount Percival , i, 113NEWTON AS HERETICIsaac Newton was a heretic. But like Nicodemus, the secret disciple of Jesus, he never made a public declaration of his private (...) faith – which the orthodox would have deemed extremely radical. He hid his faith so well that scholars are still unravelling his personal beliefs. His one-time follower William Whiston attributed his policy of silence to simple, human fear and there must be some truth in this. Every day as a public figure and as the figurehead of British natural philosophy, Newton must have felt the tension of outwardly conforming to the Anglican Church, while inwardly denying much of its faith and practice. He was restricted by heresy laws, religious tests and the formidable opposition of public opinion. Heretics were seen as religiously subversive, socially dangerous and even morally debased. Moreover, the positions he enjoyed were dependent on public manifestations of religious and social orderliness. Sir Isaac had a lot to lose. Yet he knew the scriptural injunctions against hiding one's light under a bushel. Newton the believer was thus faced with the need to develop a modus vivendi whereby he could work within legal and social structures, while fulfilling the command to shine in a dark world. This paper recovers and assesses his strategies for reconciling these conflicting dynamics and, in so doing, will shed light on both the nature of Newton's faith and his agenda for natural philosophy. (shrink)