This chapter contains sections titled: The Common School in France and Britain LAïCITÉ: Some Matters of Definition Understanding the Context Faith, Culture and the School The Role of the School The Epistemological Status of Religious Studies Religious Illiteracy: The Policy Response Religion, Neutrality and the Logic of LAïCITÉ Religious Worldviews and the Teaching of Literature Notes References.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Freedom, Truth, and Human Dignity: The Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom: A New Translation, Redaction History, and Interpretation of “Dignitatis humanae.” by David L. Schindler and Jr. Nicholas J. HealyBarrett H. TurnerFreedom, Truth, and Human Dignity: The Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom: A New Translation, Redaction History, and Interpretation of “Dignitatis humanae.” By David L. Schindler and Nicholas J. Healy, Jr. Grand Rapids, Mich.: (...) Eerdmans, 2015. Pp. xiv + 477. $45.00 (paper). ISBN: 978-0-8028-7155-8.“I fear that you are going to give the inaccurate impression that this document was exclusively the work of the Americans at the Council, or nearly so,” wrote Ernest Primeau, an American bishop who helped revise Dignitatis humanae (DH) at Vatican II, to a priest-journalist. “The truth is... that many others from other nations played an important role in the writing and passage of the declaration.” Despite Primeau’s warning, popular and scholarly interpretations of DH have often hewed closely to John Courtney Murray’s juridical approach, usually in contrast to the integralism of Cardinal Alfredo [End Page 309] Ottaviani and the Spanish episcopate. Yet “many others” did not fit into those two groups, for a large contingent of bishops favorable to religious liberty nonetheless sought to undergird the juridical reasoning for the right with an ontological foundation.David L. Schindler and Nicholas Healy promote these other voices in Freedom, Truth, and Human Dignity. Indeed, they argue that the other voices—the “French” or “ontological” school comprised of bishops such as Alfred Ancel and Karol Wojtyła—provide the true key to DH’s meaning and significance. The book thus responds from the perspective of Communio theology to Murray-ite political theologies that are critical of John Paul II’s emphasis on truth as the basis for freedom. Accompanying Schindler’s and Healy’s essays are conciliar texts charting the origin and influence of this ontological school: the six conciliar drafts, the oral and written interventions of Wojtyła, and an oral intervention of Ancel. These texts, transcribed from the Acta Synodalia Sacrosancti Concilii Oecumenici Vaticani II (AS), have been translated by Patrick T. Brannon, S.J., and Michael Camacho. Also included is a side-by-side comparison of the third and sixth drafts that displays the changes made to the juridical position in response to the ontological school.Schindler’s 170-page essay, “Freedom, Truth, and Human Dignity: An Interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae on the Right to Religious Freedom,” is the heart of the work. Schindler recapitulates in a fresh way themes from his prior analyses of liberalism and Murray. In section 1, he summarizes how Wojtyła’s interventions influenced the evolution of DH such that Murray’s juridical approach became subordinated to an emphasis on truth as the foundation and telos of freedom. He conveys Wojtyła’s concern that DH not divide reason and revelation, but that reason be presented as capable of knowing that religion is “nature’s crown and summit” (50). Section 2 outlines Murray’s postconciliar objections to DH’s final version, namely, that it assumes that the American juridical approach leads to relativism and that its insistence on truth as religious liberty’s foundation undermines the universality of the right by degrading the liberty of those in error. To the first, Schindler replies (in section 3) that Murray’s juridical approach necessarily entails what Servais Pinckaers, O.P., called the “freedom of indifference,” Murray’s denials of relativism notwithstanding. The juridical approach leads to the conception of civil space as something neutral to truth-claims about God, but finally results in a state-enforced indifferentism that limits the religious liberty of those who hold that all of existence, prior to human freedom, is intrinsically ordered to God. “The human act, considered from the perspective of the juridical order, is first empty; and truth thus becomes, from that same juridical perspective, adventitious, something that, as such, cannot but logically burden the free-intelligent human act by arbitrarily limiting and closing what is considered by government, for legal purposes, to be simply open, or abstracted from all (metaphysical-religious) content... (shrink)

I offer you some theories of intellectual obligations and rights (virtue Ethics): initially, RBT (a Right to Believe Truth, if something is true it follows one has a right to believe it), and, NDSM (one has no right to believe a contradiction, i.e., No right to commit Doxastic Self-Mutilation). Evidence for both below. Anthropology, Psychology, computer software, Sociology, and the neurosciences prove things about human beliefs, and History, Economics, and comparative law can provide evidence of value about theories of rights. (...) However, insofar as we have methods within Philosophy to help us formulate precise concepts of 'belief' and 'rights', methods that also help us to prove links (or absence thereof) amongst families of concepts of rights and belief, our discipline is in and of itself capable of sound reasoning about issues as puzzling as the following. Suppose a Jane who does not believe in God yet who believes she ought to so believe: Jane is undergoing doxastic moral regret (moral regret for lack of faith). We have all known such Janes and perhaps at one time or another even been one. Paradox: given RBT and NDSM, Jane as described not only does not exist, Jane cannot exist. Thus, to enrich the ways in which Philosophy need not get all its evidence from other academic disciplines, I present a brief introduction to what I call Neutral Universal Frames (NUFs). NUFs solve hard puzzles about interactions among modal concepts of belief and rights, concepts that occur in RBT, NDSM and the description of our Janes. NUFs for theories precisely articulated via any two or more modal concepts are a powerful and immensely general set of tools enabling us to define rich theories of truth ("models on frames") to test philosophical theories for internal consistency and to prove the existence of connections (or absence thereof) amongst alternative articulations of philosophical theories. NUFs thereby add to the constructive knowledge producing way Logics intersect with Philosophy of Religion. And we will soon see why Jane, be she named 'Jane' or known simply as you: cannot exist. Read on at your own risk. (shrink)

General preface -- Preface to the second edition -- What is philosophy of religion? -- Philosophy of religion and other disciplines -- Philosophy of religion and philosophy -- Can thinking about religion be neutral? -- Fideism -- Neutralism -- Critical dialogue -- The theistic God : the project of natural theology -- Concepts of God -- The theistic concept of God -- A case study : divine foreknowledge and human freedom -- The problem of religious language -- Natural theology -- (...) Proofs of God's existence -- Classical arguments for God's existence -- Ontological arguments -- Cosmological arguments -- Teleological arguments -- Moral arguments -- Conclusions: The value of theistic argument -- Religious experience -- Types of religious experience -- Models for understanding experience -- Experience of God as direct and mediated -- Are religious experiences veridical? -- Checking experiential claims -- Special acts of God : revelation and miracles -- Special acts -- Theories of revelation -- Is the traditional view defensible? -- What is a miracle? -- Is it reasonable to believe in miracles? -- Can a revelation have special authority? -- Religion, modernity, and science -- Modernity and religious belief -- Naturalism -- Do the natural sciences undermine religious belief? -- Objections from the social sciences -- Religious uses of modern atheism -- The problem of evil -- Types of evil, versions of the problem, and types of response -- The logical form of the problem -- The evidential form of the problem -- Horrendous evils and the problem of hell -- Divine hiddenness -- Faith(s) and reason -- Faith : subjectivity in religious arguments -- The evidentialist challenge to religious belief -- Reformed epistemology -- The place of subjectivity in forming beliefs -- Interpretive judgments and the nature of a cumulative case -- Can faith be certain? -- Faith and doubt : can religious faith be tested? -- What is faith? -- Could one religion be true? (shrink)

The paper begins with a more carefully stated version of ontologically neutral (ON) logic, originally introduced in (Hailperin, 1997). A non-infinitistic semantics which includes a definition of potential infinite validity follows. It is shown, without appeal to the actual infinite, that this notion provides a necessary and sufficient condition for provability in ON logic.

This article introduces a model of levels of analysis applied to statements found in philosophical, scientific, and religious discourses in order to facilitate a more accurate description of the relation between science and religion. The empirical levels prove to be the most crucial for the relation between science and religion, because they include statements that are important parts of both scientific and religious discourse, whereas statements from metaphysical levels are only important in terms of religion and are neutral in relation (...) to particular scientific theories. In particular, the rejection of certain ontological assumptions behind special divine action logically entails the rejection of the literal meaning of empirical statements describing special open expression of supernatural factors in nature. Such a rejection also entails an essential revision of many religious systems of beliefs, including traditional Christian theism. (shrink)

The academic study of religious belief and practice is frequently taken to debunk the content of religion. This attitude impedes the science‐theology dialogue and causes believers to react defensively toward studies of religion. I argue that a large, although not unrestricted, domain exists in which phenomenology of religion is neutral with respect to content, that is, compatible with either belief or unbelief. Theology can constructively interact with secular studies of religion, in some cases even explicitly hostile ones. Three themes emerge (...) that elaborate on this interaction: (1) the claim that a scientific study of religion is capable of refuting belief is a logical mistake; (2) religious practice, and to some extent belief, can benefit from secular scrutiny; (3) the entirety of religious expressions is richer than the content that can be captured by analytical study of the phenomenon. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in (...) the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

This paper considers the connection between the three-place relation, R is a reason for X to do A and the two-place relation, R is a reason to do A. I consider three views on which the former is to be analyzed in terms of the latter. I argue that these views are widely held, and explain the role that they play in motivating interesting substantive ethical theories. But I reject them in favor of a more obvious analysis, which goes the (...) other way around. (shrink)

This paper introduces the special issue on Logic and Philosophy of Religion of the journal Sophia: International Journal of Philosophy and Traditions (Springer). The issue contains the following articles: Logic and Philosophy of Religion, by Ricardo Sousa Silvestre and Jean-Yvez Béziau; The End of Eternity, by Jamie Carlin Watson; The Vagueness of the Muse—The Logic of Peirce’s Humble Argument for the Reality of God, by Cassiano Terra Rodrigues; Misunderstanding the Talk(s) of the Divine: Theodicy in the Wittgensteinian (...) Tradition, by Ondřej Beran; On the Concept of Theodicy, by Ricardo Sousa Silvestre; The Logical Problem of the Trinity and the Strong Theory of Relative Identity, by Daniel Molto; Thomas Aquinas on Logic, Being, and Power, and Contemporary Problems for Divine Omnipotence, by Errin D. Clark. -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Otherwise than Laïcité? Toward an Agonistic Secularism in LevinasMark Cauchi (bio)Levinas and SecularismAlong with the so-called “return of the religious” in contemporary Western philosophy and politics, there has been a renewed effort in recent years to rethink secularism, the political doctrine of the separation of religion and politics.1 It would not be difficult to show that Emmanuel Levinas has been a substantial force in the resurgence of interest in (...) religion among philosophers, but his impact on thinking about secularism is less evident. Part of the reason for this uncertainty, and part of the reason it is not taken up by scholars, is doubtless the fact that Levinas’s conception of secularism is difficult to discern.2 Although he often discusses religion, politics, and even their relationship, he rarely addresses the question of secularism directly. He certainly uses the term laïcité, and, especially in Difficult Freedom, often discusses both the place of Judaism in secular society and what he calls the “Christian atmosphere” of modernity, but he never articulates, either here or elsewhere, a complete account of the concept.In addition to the paucity of Levinas’s writings on secularism, a further difficulty is that what Levinas does say about secularism can often seem contradictory and unclear. Consider, for example, his view [End Page 187] of the most basic issue of secularism: the separation of church and state. Is such a separation wholly compatible with Levinas’s thinking? On the one hand, Levinas is unambiguous about his endorsement of the separation. He writes in “How Is Judaism Possible?” (1959) that the separation “is the citadel that protects us [French Jews] against injustice,” and therefore that “we must beware of tampering with it.” And yet, as he will immediately add, the “luminous and incontestable formula” separating church and state must be given “its best content,” as if in its common understanding it does not possess its best meaning (DF 245). This specific double move, where he simultaneously endorses and criticizes the separation of church and state, is indicative of Levinas’s more general attitude from the 1950s onward toward the whole of the standard liberal conception of secularism.What I mean by the latter conception will be fleshed out in the following sections, but it can be defined now, in a preliminary fashion, as the entire liberal enterprise of creating a culturally neutral state and public sphere for the sake of protecting the rights and liberties of the individual citizen. Because the individual citizen is defined as possessing the right to, or liberty of, thought, expression, and association—all of which together, in effect, produce freedom of religion, whether explicitly proclaimed or not—the state and public sphere must be constituted in particular ways to guarantee these liberties; in particular, they must be culturally neutralized so that any citizen, from whichever cultural background, can participate in public institutions without bias and thus without the violation of their liberties. Such neutralization is achieved by the reciprocal move wherein participants in these institutions—that is to say, individual citizens—are not allowed to bring their cultural frameworks with them into the constitutions and operations of these institutions, leading to the so-called privatization of religion.Because Levinas criticizes this model of secularism while seeming to endorse some notion of it, what I would like to do in this essay is to determine what is precisely Levinas’s criticism of secularism and, in addition, what a “Levinasian secularism” might be. My central contention will be that the latter (Levinasian secularism) is not equivalent [End Page 188] to the former (his stated views about secularism). The reason for this discrepancy is that Levinas critiques standard liberal secularism on the basis of his more general philosophy of ethical alterity, but then reinstates liberal secularism (or an unspecified version of it) as the best way to protect institutionally ethical alterity. This double movement raises the question, how can ethical alterity at once be consistent and inconsistent with liberal secularism? The question is naturally related to the much-discussed one about the relation of ethics and politics in Levinas’s thinking. Levinas’s approach to the latter relation is consistently... (shrink)

I argue that neutral free logic and existence hedging are incompatible. Primarily, I respond to proposals by James Pryor intended to reconcile the two. Consideration of those proposals will reveal that on any neutral free logic either some existence hedges will entail some undesired existence claims, or they will not entail some desired existence claims.

Abstract. As a general theory of reasoning—and as a general theory of what holds true under every possible circumstance—logic is supposed to be ontologically neutral. It ought to have nothing to do with questions concerning what there is, or whether there is anything at all. It is for this reason that traditional Aristotelian logic, with its tacit existential presuppositions, was eventually deemed inadequate as a canon of pure logic. And it is for this reason that modern quantification (...) theory, too, with its residue of existentially loaded theorems and patterns of inference, has been claimed to suffer from a defect of logical purity. The law of non-contradiction rules out certain circumstances as impossible—circumstances in which a statement is both true and false, or perhaps circumstances where something both is and is not the case. Is this to be regarded as a further ontological bias? (shrink)

This book focuses on the financing of religions, examining some European church-state models, using a philosophical methodology. The work defends autonomy-based liberalism and elaborates how this liberalism can meet the requirements of liberal neutrality. The chapters also explore religious education and the financing of institutionalized religion. This volume collates the work of top scholars in the field. Starting from the idea that autonomy-based liberalism is an adequate framework for the requirement of liberal neutrality, the author elaborates why a (...) liberal state can support religions and how she should do this, without violating the principle of neutrality. Taking into account the principle of religious freedom and the separation of church and state, this work explores which criteria the state should take into account when she actively supports religions, faith-based schools and religious education. A number of concrete church-state models, including hands-off, religious accommodation and the state church are evaluated, and the book gives some recommendations in order to optimize those church-state models, where needed. Practitioners and scholars of politics, law, philosophy and education, especially religious education, will find this work of particular interest as it has useful guidelines on policies and practices, as well as studies of church-state models. (shrink)

Free logics are a family of first-order logics which came about as a result of examining the existence assumptions of classical logic (Hintikka _The Journal of Philosophy_, _56_, 125–137 1959 ; Lambert _Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic_, _8_, 133–144 1967, 1997, 2001 ). What those assumptions are varies, but the central ones are that (i) the domain of interpretation is not empty, (ii) every name denotes exactly one object in the domain and (iii) the quantifiers have existential import. (...) Free logics reject the claim that names need to denote in (ii). _Positive_ free logic concedes that some atomic formulas containing non-denoting names (including self-identity) are true, _negative_ free logic treats them as uniformly false, and _neutral_ free logic as taking a third value. There has been a renewed interest in analyzing proof theory of free logic in recent years, based on intuitionistic logic in Maffezioli and Orlandelli (_Bulletin of the Section of Logic_, _48_(2), 137–158 2019 ) as well as classical logic in Pavlović and Gratzl (_Journal of Philosophical Logic_, _50_, 117–148 2021 ), there for the positive and negative variants. While the latter streamlines the presentation of free logics and offers a more unified approach to the variants under consideration, it does not cover neutral free logic, since there is some lack of both clear formal intuitions on the semantic status of formulas with empty names, as well as a satisfying account of the conditional in this context. We discuss extending the results to this third major variant of free logics. We present a series of G3 sequent calculi adapted from Fjellstad (_Studia Logica_, _105_(1), 93–119 2017, _Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logics_, _30_(3), 272–289 2020 ), which possess all the desired structural properties of a good proof system, including admissibility of contraction and all versions of the cut rule. At the same time, we maintain the unified approach to free logics and moreover argue that greater clarity of intuitions is achieved once neutral free logic is conceptualized as consisting of two sub-varieties. (shrink)

In this article, I address some higher-order issues involving the concept of God that arise within a pluralistic context: the problem of conceptual unity, the problem of unicity of extension and the problem of homogeneity/heterogeneity. My proposal to solve these questions involves a special hybrid theory of concepts, called the theory of ideal concepts. I argue that when associated with a pluralistic vision of concepts, and formalized within a possible world structure, such theory provides a satisfactory answer to these problems. (...) The formalization is based on a specific version of the Simplest Quantified Modal Logic (SQML), and its presentation is exclusively semantic, keeping technical details to a minimum. (shrink)

By considering the way in which the mechanism of the scapegoat in René Girard's work is predicated on a phenomenal and anthropic understanding of violence, the following shows how Girard's anthropological conception of religion determines and limits from the beginning relations between the violent and the nonviolent and the phenomenal and the nonphenornenal. This conception is then inscribed within a larger economy of violence that opens up Girard's account of victimization and sacrifice to wider determinations. Important distinctions are made along (...) the way between the human sciences, religion, ethics and philosophy. If the work of Jacques Derrida in particular and deconstruction in general permit this widening in this article, I then argue however that such concepts as originary violence also short‐circuit the differentiations, with which we are concerned, to address, with and beyond Girard, a radical ethics of the lesser violence. (shrink)

This article explores the question of whether it is morally permissible for the liberal state to require schools to teach religions “neutrally” to children. I examine this question through the normative analysis of Canadian Supreme Court case Loyola High School v. Quebec. I argue that it is in principle morally impermissible for the liberal state to oblige all schools to adopt a neutral approach to teaching children about religious diversity. I propose a normative framework for evaluating the legitimacy of such (...) an imposition and identify a strategy in support of accommodating schools like Loyola that does not appeal to the existence of a strong parental right to control their children’s education. (shrink)

The relation between truth and violence is explored through the logic of sacrifice presented in the Book of Job. Job, as an arbitrary sacrificial victim, learns the truth of the violence perpetrated against him. Such violence is also shown to be constitutive of Western reasoning, including its practices of the truth.

This book is a thorough study of the question posed by Kant, For what can a human being rationally hope? It offers a detailed commentary on Kant's seminal work, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, as well as an original development of the logic of three of Kant's basic ideas: ambivalence, ignorance, and hope. Sophisticated analytic techniques, including symbolic logic, are applied to this conceptual matrix. The result is a striking case for the transformation of world society (...) into a Kingdom of Ends of individuals and a peaceful League of Nations. (shrink)

The Logic of Religion presents an examination of the nature of religion from a philosophical perspective. In successive chapters classical, medieval, and modern authors are canvassed for their views.

Scholars theorize the effect of modernization on religious and familial institutions in a parallel way. Some argue that both are irreversibly in decline—as secularization and deinstitutionalization, respectively—while others argue that they have either merely changed or are in fact growing stronger. However, correctly interpreting institutional change depends not only on how one evaluates the empirical starts and endpoints but also on how one defines the domains under change themselves. In this paper, I examine these debates, detail the structural similarities in (...) their arguments, and outline a new analytical approach informed by recent work in institutional logics to better answer the definitional questions. Theorizing both institutions together and their parallel trajectories in modernity reveals unique insights about the scholarly discourse on modernization and is especially important given the unique influence of religion and family on one another as (seemingly) privatized spheres of social life. (shrink)

In this article the author shows that we must distinguish between criterion as a characteristic in a definition and as a norm for truth and ethical values. He shows that we must accept a hierarchy of such criteria, But that this hierarchy is not absolute. He also discusses and solves the 'paradox of the publican'.

Semantic externalism in the style of McDowell and Evans faces a puzzle formulated by Pryor: to explain that a sentence such as 'Jack exists' is only a posteriori knowable, despite being logically entailed by the seemingly logical truth 'Jack is self-identical', and hence being itself a logical truth and therefore a priori knowable. Free logics can dissolve the puzzle. Moreover, Pryor has argued that the existentially hedged 'If Jack exists, then Jack is self-identical', when properly formalised, is a logical truth (...) in a system of neutral free logic and therefore a priori knowable, while it does not entail that Jack exists. The latter holds also for negative free logic. In response, Yeakel has argued that on any system of neutral free logic existence hedges will either entail some unwanted existence claims or they will not entail some wanted existence claims. The dilemma also holds for any non-positive free logic. It will be shown that the extension of one of the systems of neutral free logic with a truth operator escapes Yeakel's dilemma, whereas no other non-positive free logic when extended with the truth operator does the same (or it breaks quantifier exchangeability). (shrink)

We examine the impact of Suzumura’s (Economica 43:381–390, 1976) consistency property when applied in the context of collective choice rules that are independent of irrelevant alternatives, neutral, and monotonic. An earlier contribution by Blau and Deb (Econometrica 45:871–879, 1977) establishes the existence of a vetoer if the collective relation is required to be complete and acyclical. The purpose of this paper is to explore the possibilities that result if completeness and acyclicity are dropped and Suzumura consistency is imposed instead. A (...) conceptually similar but logically independent version of the combined axiom that requires the collective decision mechanism to be independent, neutral, and monotonic is employed. In the case of a finite population, we obtain an alternative impossibility theorem if a collective choice rule is assumed to be non-degenerate and a modified no veto requirement is imposed instead of Blau and Deb’s (1977) condition. If the population is countably infinite, the impossibility can be avoided but it resurfaces if our new no veto property is extended to a coalitional variant. (shrink)

Religion has become a new focus of study in the investigation of current crises and social conflicts in the post-modern world. This study seeks to examine the role of religion in social change and to discover possible alternatives to social problems. East Asian countries have followed a different path of development from Western societies, which is illustrated by the close affinity between religion and modernization, in contrast to the assumptions of secularization theories. The strong role of religion in modernization promotes (...) not only rapid economic development, but also social integration and a strong sense of cultural identity. Although East Asian development is often defined the model of Confucianism-led development, Christianity have been strongly involved in modernizing societies and restructuring social class in East Asia. In the complex nexus of social dynamics, social role of religion changes into another phase in the 21 st century. South Korea is the particular focus of this study because Korea illustrates the dynamic influence of religion in social development, and the drastic changes in the role of religion in the public domain among East Asian countries. This new religious phase reflects a power shift from religious institutions to the media. Spiritual life becomes mediatized when institutionalized religion declines. The mediatization of religion in South Korea demonstrates the double-edged sword of this process, by modifying spirituality into the media logic and, at the same time, by reviving native beliefs and cultural integrity alternative to Western capitalist development. (shrink)

With his Logic of Incarnation, James K. A. Smith has provided a compelling critique of the universalizing tendencies in some strands of postmodern philosophy of religion. A truly postmodern account of religion must take seriously the preference for particularity first evidenced in the Christian account of the incarnation of God. Moving beyond the urge to universalize, which characterizes modern thought, Smith argues that it is only by taking seriously particular differences--historical, religious, and doctrinal--that we can be authentically religious and (...) authentically postmodern. Smith remains hugely influential in both academic discourse and church movements. This book is the first organized attempt to bring both of these aspects of Smith's work into conversation with each other and with him. With articles from an internationally respected group of philosophers, theologians, pastors, and laypeople, the entire range of Smith's considerable influence is represented here. Discussing questions of embodiment, eschatology, inter-religious dialogue, dogma, and difference, this book opens all the most relevant issues in postmodern religious life to a unique and penetrating critique. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 30.1 (2000) 49-77 [Access article in PDF] The Time of the King Gift and Exchange in Zorrilla's Don Juan Tenorio Joan Ramon Resina There is something paradoxical about José Zorrilla's revision of the Don Juan legend, a certain contradiction between the play's structure and the logic of the action. The character of the protagonist, the form and implications of Don Juan's salvation, the strategies and temporality of (...) seduction, even the play's generic status--all come under the law of self-cancellation. And so does the historical time in which the play is set: the time of absolute monarchy. The proportionality between terrestrial and eschatological time, organic to the play's Golden Age precursor, 1 is strangely neutralized in Zorrilla's work through an expanding temporality without equivalent in the afterlife; and the same is true of the king's dramatic role through his removal from the scene, which he regulates nonetheless as deus ex machina of the social edifice.A nineteenth-century reader, Francesc Pi i Margall, remarked that "Zorrilla hace a Don Juan escéptico o creyente según lo van exigiendo las peripecias de su drama, y merced a esa indeterminación del carácter, le pone repetidamente en contradicción consigo mismo" (Zorrilla makes Don Juan a skeptic or a believer depending on the drama's events, and by virtue of this indeterminacy, he brings his character repeatedly into contradiction with himself) [204]. This indeterminacy affects not only the libertine's relation to religion but also the doctrinal coherence of the play, which has been the object of debate [see Mazzeo; Abrams; Wang; Romero]. Others, curiously, detect a contradiction between the play's sound theological conception and the author, who "quizá no sabe apenas nada de teología" (perhaps knows next to nothing about theology) [Alberich 16]. Yet not only Don Juan's piety but also his seductions appear self-annulling. For Luis Fernández Cifuentes, Zorrilla's most original and thus most revealing decision is "presentar el acto de seducción engañosa en el momento mismo en que deja de serlo: la carta con que comienza el drama participa de una tradición que también cancela. En el curso de la obra, es y no es un instrumento de seducción; sin cambiar de palabras, es a la vez falsa y verdadera... " (to present the act of deceitful seduction at the very moment in which it stops being deceitful: the letter with which the play starts participates in a tradition which it also cancels. Throughout the play the letter is and is not a tool of seduction; its words are at once true and false...) [83]. In the same line of structural contradictions must be included the play's temporality, which runs counter to the causal logic of the action. As Gustavo Pérez Firmat points out: "In Juan's verses normal temporal and causal sequence collapses, for future events are always catching up and outstripping the present, as if time were circular and past, present, and future travelled the circle at different speeds" [7]. Even the play's representativeness as a privileged [End Page 49] instance of Spanish romanticism has been flatly denied in light of its inconsistencies with the patterns of that movement [Gies, "José Zorrilla"]. 2 But perhaps the most telling contradiction is the one between the play's undiminished popularity for almost a century and its author's sedulous efforts to undermine its prestige. 3Author's second thoughts? A repentant artist in ascetic revulsion against mundane acclaim? It seems reasonable to assume a link between the play's popularity and the contradictions to which it gives expression. Thus, taking at face value the tired notion that Don Juan presents a fundamentally Spanish profile, 4 I will inquire whether the play's manifest contradictions are culturally efficient. 5 To this end, I will need to consider a possible incongruity between nineteenth-century forms of consciousness and the objective historical conditions. Joaquín Casalduero already pointed out a discrepancy between historical changes and... (shrink)

“Artworks are not being but a process of becoming” —Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory In the everyday use of the concept, saying that something is grotesque rarely implies anything other than saying that something is a bit outside of the normal structure of language or meaning – that something is a peculiarity. But in its historical use the concept has often had more far reaching connotations. In different phases of history the grotesque has manifested its forms as a means of (...) subversive resistance against society’s prevailing notions of form and power. What aids this impact and distinguishes two of its basic stylistic features is the grotesque’s dissolution of form and its hyperbole. Such grotesqueries, however, soon solidify into new forms, new structures of meaning, hierarchy and practice, and in this sense the history of the grotesque is, on one hand, a continual opposition and transgression of the prevailing notions of art as well as of God and humanity, while on the other hand it offers continual resistance to its own solidifying process. As such the grotesque will not and cannot be contained in form without it losing the very thing that makes it grotesque. Even though it is somewhat easy to point out certain stylistic features of the grotesque, the sum of those features tell us very little about what is at play within it. Definitions concerned with the grotesque’s content rather than its form faces similar difficulties. Throughout history, expressions relating to the grotesque have been used in defense of a whole host of different social and cultural discourse including, for instance, Catholicism (See Erhard Schön’s Der Teufel mit der Sackpfeife , 1536), Protestantism (See Lucas Cranach’s Der Papstesel , 1523), a material folk culture (see Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his World , 1984) and an idealistic romantic structure of meaning (see Wolfgang Kayser’s The Grotesque in Art and Literature , 1957). Thus though the grotesque cannot be reduced to the expression of certain forms or meanings, in order to examine what the grotesque is about one has to try to see how it’s relationship to flow and process and how, by maintaining this relationship, it attempts to avoid solidifying into form and meaning. The process of the grotesque alluded to here revolves around a play between periphery and center, the marginalized and the dominant. Most often this is expressed as a direct negation of the center of power. In the medieval grotesque tradition of the carnival, for example, it is expressed by its emphasis on the nether regions of the body as the center of creation of meaning. Spirit does not come from above, but from the belly, buttocks and genitals, and there is, expressed in this manner, a mockery of the predominant Christian notion of truth and meaning. Such inversions of the sites of meaning most often explicitly express an increased interest in materiality instead of ideal content which comes to the fore through the play between periphery and center. Even in early grotesque Renaissance art (for example in the works of Raphael) the depiction of the mythological or ideal reveals an exploration of the possibilities of the material. The works of art thus explore their own boundaries rather than act as vessels of the divine and in this way the grotesque explores the limits of form and materiality. This in turn brings to the fore a metaphysical dimension in the workings of the grotesque: It is an immanent exploration of its own boundaries. Materiality and metaphysics are joined together, because it is through the awareness of itself as a structuring (dis)order that it places itself in opposition to the prevailing notions of form and power. This way the grotesque expresses an awareness of the division of sign and reality and a search for this reality. It implicitly expresses the awareness that meaning is not something God-given and static, but fluctuating and man-made. In modern explorations of the history of the grotesque it is commonly seen as a form of realism that manifests a shift from the ideal towards the material, freeing art from representing some hidden higher order and instead making the work of art the very site of creation and meaning. Going even further, the grotesque actively opposes the notions of the ideal by marking a shift from an ahistorical view of the world towards the historical. However, this also makes clear why the grotesque has a tendency to solidify into new static forms of meaning, for by establishing itself as a subversive counterforce there is an idea of transgression and emancipation. That is why the grotesque often historicizes and relativizes only to repeat the mistakes of that which it negates: putting itself in the king’s chair. The exploration of the material seems to create new forms and notions of the ideal. The representation of an otherness outside the prevailing notions of meaning and truth becomes a positive manifestation of this otherness as truth itself. Thus the historical “truths” of the grotesque are superseded by history itself. When the expressions of the grotesque solidify into static form and meaning, they become mere objects like anything else in the world. Instead of being this elusive thing of process and flow, it becomes tangible to the existing hierarchy of power as well as history itself. In this way the grotesque can be expunged, included or simply revealed as yet another false notion of truth, which is precisely what has happened with the grotesque throughout the course of history. If from the beginning the expression of the grotesque has not already been in the service of some structure of meaning and truth, it has quickly been included or has quickly included itself in such a structure. But by doing so it rejects its own basis: the tension between periphery and center is replaced by the attempt to create a new center, a new structure of meaning and truth. The doubleness, ambiguity and flow of the grotesque are then rejected by the grotesque itself. THE NON-FORM OF FORM In the critical thinking of Theodor W. Adorno (1903-69) the problem of art, caught between a reductive and prevalent notion of truth and meaning and a peripheral and alienated otherness, is reexamined and reformulated. For Adorno, the instrumental rationality of Enlightenment itself reverts into a new form of mythology which is every bit as static and exclusive as the hierarchies of religion it supersedes. All is excluded that is non-identical to the instrumental mastery of the objects of the world, "For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion; modern positivism consigns it to poetry." 1 As such the non-identical has been banished from the realm of thought and action, and banished specifically to the realm of art. But the realm of art is not able to provide a decent home for it because even modern art is not something entirely autonomous. While it is excluded from the notions of truth and meaning provided by instrumental rationality, it still originates from society. Just like instrumental rationality art is about mastery, structuring and exclusion. Therefore, the problem for art is that it cannot directly provide a space for the non-identical because its mode of operation is similar to that of instrumental rationality. Even worse, art has very few possibilities to free itself from this. If it becomes l’art pour l’art it is at the same time reduced to the very thing instrumental rationality claims it to be: a subjective judgment of taste.expressionism also stands as an example of this. Conversely, art cannot work within the framework of the identity-thinking of society, because any notion of freedom or emancipation would reproduce the exclusive practices of instrumental rationality. For example: Explicit socialist literature may establish itself in opposition to instrumental rationality while at the same time reproducing it. Its language may seem different, but in reality it merely provides a different set of reductive schematics for human life and experience. The problem for the art of the grotesque was, as I mentioned earlier, that far too often it was merely a symbolic manifestation of a notion of otherness—not otherness itself. Because of this the subversive character of the grotesque ends up shaping and containing otherness instead of providing a space for it. According to Adorno the only way to avoid this is to radicalize the grotesque. In order to avoid solidifying into form the work of art has to be an object which cannot be contained in thought or form—a non-form of form. The work of art has to work in a way that it strives for autonomy but without entirely leaving a discernible reality. In other words, it has to pull in two directions at once. Thus the work of art is a paradox. It is autonomous in the sense that it closes itself off from everything outside of the work of art, trying to shy away from the contaminating influence of the identity thinking of instrumental rationality. At the same time though the work of art is heteronomous in the sense that it originates from a specific historical context and is bound to be what society is not. Autonomy and heteronomy are inseparably intertwined. Unable to display otherness itself, but still trying to be a refuge for it, there is only one option for art: It has to turn against itself and destroy its own logic of form, thereby demonstrating how any representation of otherness is impossible. Art becomes a lamentation of the victims of the identity thinking of instrumental rationality and shows the traces of the otherness that is unable to appear. Adorno’s pessimistic theory of art and history stages art as a negative dialectical process where the work of art closes itself off and rejects everything outside, while the individual elements in the work of art destroys its very own logic of form from within: Artworks synthetize ununifiable, nonidentical elements that grind away at each other; they truly seek the identity of the identical and nonidentical processually because even their unity is only an element and not the magical formula of the whole […]. The resistance to them of otherness, on which they are nevertheless dependent compels them to articulate their own formal language, to leave not the smallest unformed particle as remnant. This reciprocity constitutes art’s dynamic; it is an irresolvable antithesis that is never brought to rest in the state of being. 2 Relative to a traditional understanding of the grotesque, Adorno radicalizes the tension between center and periphery, autonomy and heteronomy. In the traditional understanding of the grotesque, as we find it for example in the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin, the grotesque establishes the display of otherness as a new center of meaning and truth. However Adorno rejects such notions and argues instead for a modernism of the grotesque in which both center and periphery are included in a negative dialectical process and continually synthesizing and destabilizing each other’s positions. A modernism of the grotesque works on the inside of the sign or the artwork, continually outlining and questioning the boundaries between materiality and form. This moves the focus away from the relation between the sign or work of art as a conceptual manifestation on one side and the object it refers to on the other side. Instead it implicitly points to the amorphous mass from which the signs and thereby meaning have been carved, the remnants that have been left behind. Modernism of the grotesque does not imply that it is emancipatory or that it reconciles man with nature, and does not represent a new position or a new ideology. It merely remembers and insists on the double nature of man and art: to write or paint yourself or an artwork whole by inscribing meaning in life or by applying form on a canvas is at the same time both creation and destruction. The very signs we use to center meaning in our lives carry its own alienation in them. Meaning surfaces only when process and flow comes to a halt—solidifying, but at the same time excluding parts that do not fit into that particular structure of meaning. NOTHING DONE AND NOTHING UNDONE It has always been difficult for art historians to find a suitable category for the works of the Danish artist Leif Lage (b. 1933). In his paintings the sensitive figuration seems so fragile that it is on the verge of turning into abstraction. Or conversely: the figurative emerges cautiously and hesitantly out of abstraction. As an art critic once wrote, he can almost paint things away. 3 Working in some undefinable space between abstraction and figuration, the Lage’s works shy away from the realm of words, and as a result few critics have been able to write anything meaningful about his works. In fact even fewer have been able to write more than one or two pages. The Danish author and art critic Leif Hjernøe is one of those few, but even he starts off by saying how impossible it is to write about Lage, confessing that his works exist both as process and in a field of in-between which words cannot reach. He writes: Always you find yourself in a place where nothing is done and nothing left undone, and where the elements of the work of art rest in a continuous motion. Always there is the open wound, where infection rather than surgical intervention is considered as an opportunity. And the conflict between matter and antimatter makes all diagnoses uncertain and allows conditions of uncertainty to spread in a place of raw presence. 4 The art works against the diagnosis and the certainty. Words are being eaten up by what is outside the realm of words: tension, process and doubleness. An approach to an understanding of the work of Lage could be to follow his connection to Samuel Beckett (1906-89). One can note, therefore, that Lage has illustrated several of the Danish translations of Beckett’s works. Though one is an author and the other a painter both seek a place where figuration, where the word, erodes. For both this entails an attempt to question and examine and so move in behind the façade of the surface in an exploration of that something or nothing that may be behind representation. At the same time even in the vanishing point of figuration or words, the meaningless words or the disjointed lines still stand as signs of human activity—signs of movement in emptiness. With very few exceptions Lage’s artworks revolve around one motif: Man—most often “en face.” But unlike traditional portraitures Lage’s people are found within. The artworks do not sense the reality of appearances, but rather the existential dimensions within man. As a seismograph they are sensitive to the utmost subjectivity in order to display an objective, sensuous depiction of the very problem of subjectivity. Instead of a static façade of a man, Lage’s “en face” shows the process-character of man. The people in Lage’s paintings are always in process—in the midst of becoming or dissolving. I will take a closer look in the following at the ways in which Lage establishes this sense of being in constant process, of being in-between modes or categories. THE DOUBLENESS OF THE STROKE Lage’s etchings attract attention in particular for the tension conveyed there between the material and the form. The material physically opposes the violence of the needle. But instead of embracing the violence of the needle and the victory over matter—instead of making the artistic creation and figuration express a heroic mastery of the background it is made out of—Lage uses the stroke to express the very tension between stroke and material, figuration and background. In the drypoint etching Untitled from 1983, which illustrated the Danish translation of Beckett’s Ill Seen, Ill Said , the needle tears up the material in long rough lines: Together, the primarily horizontal and vertical lines form a face. Thus the force needed to etch a line in the metal-plate draws attention to itself: It is there in the absence of curves and nuances. Man emerges on the metal-plate after great exertion and in a very simplistic form. This way Lage enhances the nature of the material, as the material’s resistance is not something to overcome. On the contrary the figuration is smitten by its very resistance and as such expresses the violence of its own becoming. Even more pronounced is the fact that the lines do not just show the violence of creation—it actively erases figuration in the same process that creates it. For example the mouth consists of 8-10 horizontal strokes, of which some seem to be connected to each other as if the mouth has been quickly scratched out. The mouth speaks of the inability to speak. In the same way, the eyes are black holes due to a large amount of criss-cross cuts, which together form a dark middle. Those lines, at the same time, form the eyes of the figuration and scratch out the eyes of the figuration. The extroverted aspects of the face—connected to speech and sight—are portrayed as introverted as well. Just as the etchings down into the metal-plate makes something appear. Leif Lage, Untitled , 1983 (etching) The figuration of the etching is connected to creation. It expresses that something is wrought into existence out of nothing by sheer artistic force. However, this force is at the same time presented as a violence of creation, which makes it impossible for form to truly emerge. Herein lies one of the basic principles of Lage’s art, namely that art cannot be that nothing or something behind the realm of words or signs. Without form, art would lose its ability to express anything at all. Form is a necessity if art is to avoid becoming as devoid of expression as the reality is that we cannot reach behind the appearance of things. On the other hand, art cannot raise itself above its own material in joyous celebration of the beauty of form. This would use the material in the manner of an instrument and thus would suppress the otherness it attempts to rescue. When art becomes mere form, any traces of otherness will have dissolved. Then art would be a question of technique, in no way different from the instrumental rationality of society. Therefore art works in a particular space between form and non-form. As Hjernøe says of the works of Lage, it is in the center of the event, in the in-between where things neither are nor are not, "And everything takes place just before it changes character. As the blood just before it coagulates, as the milk just before it separates, as fried egg just before it turns white […]." 5 The precise emphasis on the in-between of Lage’s art points in particular to the work of art as both outside of and in time. The work of art is a singular point in time, but at the same time it is continually in process. In the borderland between form and non-form, between creation and destruction, it shimmers like a fata morgana . The work is done but at the same time undone. It is only there as a cry in response to the inability to come into being. Akin to the etching is the drawing, but while both, of course, use the stroke or line as their main instrument, the paper does not resist the line in the same sense as the metal-plate of the etching. As a result in Lage’s drawings the stroke frolics in a space with almost no tension at all. There is nothing there to keep the pencil stroke at bay, but at the same time this means that there is nothing there to keep it together. One of the more expressive examples of this is found in an untitled drawing from Tegninger og Text ( Drawings and Text ) from 1999. The drawing consists of one unbroken pencil stroke. It is as if the stroke is confused—it darts around on the paper making doodles on the way or gathers itself in more straight lines in the center of the paper. It is in this manner that the semblance of a body is established. A couple of small circles serve as eyes and are the reason that the rest can be read as both face and body instead of pure abstraction. In fact the unbroken stroke serves as both abstraction and figuration as on the one hand it is the stroke that seemingly outlines the shape of a figure, while on the other hand the unbroken stroke dissolves any truly recognizable figuration by continuously, without end or aim, overflowing the boundaries of the figure. Seen again here is a doubleness to the stroke and the act of creation. In the etching it was all about the tension between the resistance of the material which created the doubleness. Here it is the opposite. It is the lack of tension. The stroke is free to do anything, but has no aim: without some kind of resistance, there is nothing to hold figuration together. It threatens to dissolve into nothingness. Conversely, the drawing can also be seen as a process of becoming. Like a form of automatic writing, the pencil darts around until it finds a point of densification. But even in such an interpretation of the drawing, the figuration appears artificial—it points to itself as the result of the artistic act of creation. The stroke is primarily stroke and only secondarily figuration. With its wild movement it calls attention to itself as stroke. Thus the figuration never becomes something in its own right. It points to the basic principle of creation: Someone has drawn me, I am the result of artistic endeavors, and therefore I am not for myself but always overflowing the boundaries that contain me. It is the stroke that in the very same movement creates figuration and dissolves it. Leif Lage, Untitled , 1999 (drawing) THE LIGHTNESS OF COLOR, THE DENSITY OF PAPER Often the watercolor is used as a precursor for larger paintings, because it has an immediacy in which one can quickly paint the main lines of a composition. However, Lage’s watercolors are not temporary points in a process leading to another final painting. They are not sketches, later to be filled with details in another material. For him watercolor is an end in itself. This also implies that he doesn’t try to work against the paper’s absorption of the water color and its tendency to absorb detail. On the contrary, he examines the possibilities inherent in this blurring of the line and absorption of color. As in the previous examples, there are of course recognizable shapes in Lage’s water colors. But these shapes are rarely separable from color, line or even paper. In other words: the figurative and the abstract more or less become one. One of the reasons for this is that Lage often works on wetted paper which means that the paper hungrily absorbs color into its fabric instead of it being on top of the paper. The paper becomes line because it is the absorption of the color which, together with the brush stroke itself, separates the colors from each other. The line is also color and the color is also line, because there is no separation between the different colors other than the colors themselves. At times this results in almost complete abstraction. In such cases Lage add lines with a pencil as if he wants to hold some sort of figuration together. At other times it is the other way around: the strokes of the pencil are a being dissolved by the water color blurring out the figuration. Untitled 1 from 1999 displays various tones of green. The contour of the colors appears unusually rough. Most of all it is reminiscent of a shoreline which has found its form through the work of thousands of years between water and land. Pockets of resistance surface as islands not yet drowned in color—as paper or color not yet consumed by the dominant color. The shape of the colors does not seem created by the hand of the artist, but rather by the inner workings of the watercolor: color against color over time has resulted in this very image, as if it is all a part of a natural process of change and decay. Despite the fact that there are no strong differences in color there seems to be a struggle taking place in the watercolor. For example, inexplicable holes in the dark color, which cover most of the right side of the watercolor, appear as if the underlying color is eating away the dark color, or that the dark color is in the process of covering up the underlying color. The small pockets of resistance demonstrate a process and development that, almost as a happy accident, evokes a couple of small eyes and a large mouth. Behind the colors a few slanted lines can be discerned, but the hand of the artist has long ago disappeared behind the life of the colors. Thus the watercolor seems to be held at precisely the point in time where figuration randomly appears. The small eyes and wide mouth seemingly express the realization of the figuration’s temporality. It is just a moment in time, soon to be consumed again in the life of the colors. The nature, the background it stems from and is part of, moves on undeterred, continuing its everlasting process of creation and decay. In this sense, the watercolor provides an experience of how neither artist nor man is able to transcend the materiality they consist of. The colors of man, the materials man consists of are “becoming” and “progress” but also “decay” and “disappearance”. The artist’s pencil strokes have been eaten up long ago, and the figuration is living on borrowed time. Human or artistic activity is about creating form, transcending mere matter by shaping and applying meaning to it. But Untitled 1 shows the doubleness of such creation: the transience and fragility of human life. Should the figuration come into being, should it rise and transcend the material, which binds it to its temporal existence, it would become nothing because its very existence is conditioned by the life and work of the colors. In the same sense man cannot escape his own temporality. He too, for better or worse, must accept a life in the volatility of sensation. Leif Lage, Untitled 1 , 1999 (watercolor) In most of Lage’s watercolors there seem to be a stronger artistic control than in Untitled 1 . Most often both the arrangement of colors and the technique in which they are painted express the hand of the artist. An example of this is Untitled 2 from 1999. While figuration in Untitled 1 seemed to appear as a happy accident, the figuration is much more “created” in Untitled 2 . Here the most important parts of the figuration, the eyes, the mouth and part of the skull, are colored black and painted on top of the background’s play of colors. The background primarily consists of blue and yellow tones. Only parts of the paper are covered in color, however, which yet again stresses the act of painting: There is a surface which is being filled by color by an artist. The blue tones are concentrated in the figuration, while the yellow tones surround it. All this means that the figuration stands out more clearly in this watercolor. This is also underlined by the fact that the blue and dark tones cover part of the yellow tones as spots here and there. Thus it is not a background which is in the process of consuming figuration, but rather the emerging figuration which blots out the background. Such an understanding is even suggested by how the mouth and eyes are placed in the larger blue color field. The eyes and mouth are in the center of the watercolor, while the blue color field is placed from center out towards the left side. This gives the impression of a face turned slightly to the right and slightly upwards, which again makes the mouth appear to emerge from the paper. It also helps that the mouth cuts the center axis of the watercolor. In other words, the arrangement of the blue and black colors create some depth and perspective which gives the illusion of a figuration, seen partially in profile, emerging from the background. Seen in profile, the eyes and mouth seem extroverted—they almost seem as if they are put on top of the face. But at the same time they are painted as black holes, sucking in the gaze of the onlooker. The watercolor is even more challenging if one follows what may be the faint outline of the skull, which, on the right side of the watercolor, no longer works together with the blue color, but rather alone postulates the outline of the skull. If not the blue color field, but this line, is the outline of the skull, then all of a sudden the face is not in profile but “en face”—staring directly towards the onlooker. Outline and color seemingly work against each other and establish two different expressions. Without the slightly upward tilted expression of the profile, the eyes and mouth do not seem to emerge from the paper. On the contrary, seen “en face,” the eyes and mouth are really gaping pits of darkness. In this sense Untitled 2 is at the same time surface and depth of perspective. The line gives form but at the same time it dissolves the form created by the colors, and vice versa. Leif Lage, Untitled 2 , 1999 (watercolor) As the last example of Lage’s artistic method, I have chosen another untitled work (as indeed nearly all of Lage’s artworks are)—this time from 2000. This is perhaps one of the most figurative watercolors Lage has created, though that doesn’t tell us too much. The painting depicts a human face in blue and green tones on a yellow toned background. The colors create a clear demarcation between the figure and the background, which compensate for the watercolor’s lack of outline. Beneath the face darker tones imply the beginning of the torso, and nuances of color even hint at something which could be a collar. The hair is in even darker tones and its structure is emphasized using pencil strokes on top of the water color. One eye is marked by a brown spot with a darker spot in the middle, while the other eye is added by pencil. The mouth is a round, red dot. In Untitled from 2000 the work between abstraction and figuration is much less pronounced than in the previous examples cited here. Nonetheless the watercolor has a delicacy to it which almost makes the figuration disappear, even as it appears. This has something to do with the fact that all the individual brush strokes have dissolved. The only outlines are those created by the clash of colors. Even the red mouth seems to be more paint than mouth—unable to be formed truly as anything other than a speck of color with some small semblance to a mouth. In contrast to the other watercolors, there is no movement, no progress or decay, just a vibrating standstill. The figure is not emerging or disappearing but embedded in and as surface, and as such it makes the figure seem stuck in its condition rather than freed by the act of giving form: mouth open as a wound. Pencil strokes add detail and life to the hair as an attempt to help the figure emerge. But all this does is create two levels in the watercolor: The pencil strokes are put on top of the figuration rather than being part of it. Thus they end up highlighting the endless distance between the movement and form-giving of the pencil strokes and the static and stuck figure behind these strokes. Leif Lage, Untitled , 2000 (watercolor) MAN AND THE VIEW OF THE ONLOOKER Lage’s works seem at the same time to be an examination of tensions between form and material in art and a display of an image of man full of the same tensions. This is because the people who are emerging in Lage’s images are not just in his works, They are his works. This means that man is not something emerging from a background but is part of this background and vice versa. The art of Lage inscribes man in its surroundings and background. Man is not the ruler of nature. Man does not rise above matter; there is no truly transcendent position for man to occupy in the art of Lage. Instead man is a part of the very matter, it, at the same time, tries to distance itself from in order to distinguish itself from its surroundings. Man emerges in an attempt not to be line, stroke, color. In an attempt to free itself of matter. Should it succeed in this, however, it would turn into nothing. On the other hand, if man fully accepted itself as mere matter it would disappear in it—in instincts, urges and lack of reflection. The appearance of man is thus subject to a state of being in-between. Only in the tension between material and its negation can the outlines of man be traced. However this also means that in the art of Lage man is never something in itself but always in process—on the way to its freedom and its loss. However, Lage’s art is not just about showing the tensions inherent in man but also about showing such tension on the verge of breaking point. In the moment before everything is done, or when nothing yet has been done, the delicate tension between form and material has been stretched to its utmost in such a way that man’s character of process emerges and is contained on the paper or canvas. Therefore, Lage’s art contain traces of human life. Not only is it an autonomous unity of tensions where man is stretched out between its singularity and the surroundings it is a part of. It is also this pulsation between figuration and material which brings about the traces of human endeavor and activity. Even when man almost seems to have disappeared into the material, strokes and lines are still there as a reminder of human activity and potential creative power—as a reminder that hope is still possible and that man is still there. The view of the onlooker seeks out forms and meaning. It seeks outlines and edges. But first and foremost it is the eyes in Lage’s works of art that allow the onlooker to decode the figuration at play. This creates a distinctive relationship between the onlooker and the artwork. The onlooker tries to wrest the enigma from the artwork, tries to reduce it to solid, meaningful form. But the very same moment that hints at such a possibility sees the view of the onlooker confronted with a gaze of its own. The eyes of the figure in the work of art are most often dark pits, as if they were an illustration of the violence committed against the eyes of the onlookers and their search for meaning. Or as if they were a dark reflection of the onlooker’s failed attempts to delineate the traces of life in the artwork to a solid meaningful form. Therefore, the gaze of the figuration speaks not only of its own powerlessness but also of the powerlessness of the onlooker. When the view or sight has trouble finding solid meaningful forms, it has something to do with the fact that the precondition for sight, light, no longer stems from something transcendent. In Lage’s art there is nothing outside the works of art, nothing outside of human life, and as such nothing to shed light on the works of art or human life and reveal solid meaningful forms. All light comes from within. In a western context, light as a medium for sight is central to the understanding of meaning. People speak of the clarity of thought, while knowledge is tied together with enlightenment, and so forth. But the light no longer originates from a divine point of view. It originates from man, who has created himself in the image of God. The problem with this is that light always covers up its own base. Light illuminates something but at the same time it hides itself. 6 While it was previously God who was unknowable, now it is man. It is also problematic that sight and the medium of sight stem from the same place. Following this thought one can posit two final problems. Firstly, the immediacy and presence established by light by making forms and objects accessible to sight is fake. Light is not some independent entity which present things in a neutral manner for the onlooker. It is inextricably tied together with the gaze’s desire after meaning. In other words: Light perverts the appearance of things because it doesn’t originate from some objective entity which allows them to appear as they are. Instead light is based upon and originates from the subject and its conquering gaze, seeking out meaning and form constantly. Secondly, the joining of sight and light makes introspection within human life impossible. Everything can be illuminated by its use value for the subject but only as long as it is separated from the subject, as long as it is an object. But the subject itself cannot be illuminated. Lage’s art tears down such a dividing line between subject and matter, but it does so without reestablishing a divine position from where the light emanates. Therefore, the light in Lage’s art may not illuminate very well. It may not have the certainty presented by modern science or the religions of yesterday. But it does show what such light tries to hide, namely, the subject as it is in its material reality—inscribed in time and death, which are the basic conditions of materiality, but at the same time also full of life in its joy and will to create. For the onlooker the meeting of the gaze in Lage’s works of art is thus also a destruction of the view of the onlooker. The ability to see is challenged in a radical way. Those outlines will not solidify into static form, as if the light was too dim to see. Just as in Lage’s figurations, the view of the onlooker turns to black: turns towards the onlooker in recognition and becoming—or disappearance. NOTES Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment . (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002): 4-5. Theodor W. Adorno. Aesthetic Theory . (London & New York, 2002): 176. Carsten Bach-Nielsen. “Mere glæde end gru.” Kristeligt Dagblad . September 24, 2002. Leif Hjernøe. “Den yderliggående inderlighed.” LEIF LAGE—Retrospektiv udstilling 1983 . (Copenhagen: Brøndum, 1983): 18. Ibid. Maurice Blanchot. The Infinite Conversation . (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993): 162-163. (shrink)

The proceedings volume of the Fourth International Dharmakirti Conference, held in Vienna in 2005, includes a collection of thirty-six essays devoted to the work of one of the most influential philosophers of India, the sixth-century Buddhist scholar Dharmakirti. It is the next volume in a series of Dharmakirti conference proceedings that includes, to date, Studies in the Buddhist Epistemological Tradition (Vienna 1991) and Dharmakirti's Thought and Its Impact on Indian and Tibetan Philosophy (Vienna 1999). The papers in this volume present (...) research on the Buddhist logical and epistemological tradition in India and Tibet, including its cultural, philosophical and religious significance, and also emphasize the tradition's import on non-Buddhist philosophy and religion. They also report on some of the remarkable (and very important) new textual sources that have become available in recent years, namely, newly discovered Sanskrit texts by Dharmakirti and his followers. The contributions provide a rigorous and detailed overview of tlle astonishing Progress that has been made in understanding the work of Dharmakirti and his successors. Moreover, a number of essays break new ground by demonstrating various non-Buddhist contexts in which Dharmakirti's work was taken up and dealt with critically. (shrink)

In this paper I am concerned with an analysis of negative existential sentences that contain proper names only by using negative or neutral free logic. I will compare different versions of neutral free logic with the standard system of negative free logic (Burge, Sainsbury) and aim to defend my version of neutral free logic that I have labeled non-standard neutral free logic.

The "New Atheist" movement of recent years has put the science-versus-religion controversy back on the popular cultural agenda. Anti-religious polemicists are convinced that the application of the new sciences of the mind to religious belief gives them the final weapons in their battle against irrationality and superstition. What used to be a trickle of research papers scattered in specialized scientific journals has now become a torrent of books, articles, and commentary in the popular media pressing the case that the cognitive (...) science of religion can finally fulfill the enlightenment dream of shrinking religion into insignificance, if not eliminating it altogether. James W. Jones argues that these claims are demonstrably false. He notes that cognitive science research is religiously neutral; it can be deployed in many different ways in relation to the actual belief in and practice of religion: to undermine it, to simply study it, and to support it. These different approaches, Jones suggests, reflect the background assumptions and viewpoints brought to the interpretation of the data. The goal of this book is not to defend either a general religious outlook or a particular religious tradition, but to make the case that while there is much to learn from the cognitive scientific study of religion, attempts to use it to "explain" religion are exaggerated and misguided. Drawing on scientific research and logical argument Can Science Explain Religion? directly confronts the claims of these debunkers of religion, providing an accessibly written, persuasive account of why they are not convincing. (shrink)

This paper discusses the theoretical assumptions behind the conception of the logic of faith and deed and outlines its formal-axiomatic frame and its method of construction, which enable us to understand it as a kind of deductive science. The paper is divided into several sections, starting with the logical analysis of the ambiguous terms of ‚faith’ and ‚action’, and focusing in particular on the concepts of religious faith and deed as a type of conscious activity relating to a matter (...) or matters of social importance. After outlining the main ideas and basic assumptions of the theoretical conception of the LF&D as an axiomatic theory, the author introduces some axiom systems for: 1) the logics of faith LF, 2) the logic of deed LD, and 3) certain logics of norms DL connected with „duties” and concerning actions/deeds. Lastly, the paper outlines the scientific LF&D based on the three types of logic 1)–3). (shrink)

The first comprehensive analysis of the philosophical issues raised by the hijab controversy in France, this book also conducts a dialogue between contemporary Anglo-American and French political theory and defends a progressive republican solution to so-called multicultural conflicts in contemporary societies. It critically assesses the official republican philosophy of laïcité which purported to justify the 2004 ban on religious signs in schools. Laïcité is shown to encompass a comprehensive theory of republican citizenship, centered on three ideals: equality (secular neutrality (...) of the public sphere), liberty (individual autonomy and emancipation) and fraternity (civic loyalty to the community of citizens). Challenging official interpretations of laïcité, the book then puts forward a critical republicanism which does not support the hijab ban, yet upholds a revised interpretation of three central republican commitments: secularism, non-domination and civic solidarity. Thus, it articulates a version of secularism which squarely addresses the problem of status quo bias - the fact that Western societies are historically not neutral towards all religions. It also defends a vision of female emancipation which rejects the coercive paternalism inherent in the regulation of religious dress, yet does not leave individuals unaided in the face of religious and secular, patriarchal and ethnocentric domination. Finally, the book outlines a theory of immigrant integration which places the burden of civic integration on basic socio-political institutions, rather than on citizens themselves. Critical republicanism proposes an entirely new approach to the management of religious and cultural pluralism, centred on the pursuit of the progressive ideal of non-domination in existing, non-ideal societies. (shrink)

This fresh examination of the works of Montesquieu seeks to understand the shortcomings of the modern democratic state in light of this great political thinker’s insightful critique of commercial republicanism. The western democracies’ muted response to victory in the Cold War signaled the presence of a pervasive discontent, a sense that despite this victory liberal democracy itself was deeply flawed. Paul A. Rahe argues that to understand this phenomenon we must re-examine—starting with Montesquieu—the nature of liberal democracy, its character, and (...) its propensities. In a brilliant exposition of the works of Montesquieu Rahe identifies the profound sense of uneasiness fostered by the modern republic as a source of weakness and as the principal cause of the present discontents. (shrink)

The argument that(1) God exists, and is omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly goodand(2) Evil existsare logically incompatible, can be construed aporetically (as generating a puzzle and posing the constructive challenge of finding a solution that displays their compatibility) or atheologically (as a positive proof of the non-existence of God). I note that analytic philosophers of religion over the last thirty years or so have focused on the atheological deployment of the argument from evil, and have met its onslaughts from the posture (...) of defense. I take Nelson Pike (in his article “Hume on Evil”) and Alvin Plantinga (in The Nature of Necessity, “Self-Profile,” and other pieces) as paradigm defenders, analyse their approaches, and try to make explicit parameters and assumptions within which these defenses have been conducted. In particular, both writers seem to attempt a reply within the parameters of a religion-neutral value theory and on the assumption that God has obligations to do one thing rather than another in creation-both of which conspire to defend God as a producer of global goods and shift attention off the more pressing question of His agent-centered goodness. I then argue that value-theory pluralism explodes the myth of shared values, and so complicates the structure of fair-minded debate about the problem of evil as to significantly limit the utility of defense. I invite Christian philosophers to approach the problem aporetically, and to exhibit the compossibility of (1) and (2) by formulating their own beliefs about how God is solving the problem of evil using the valuables within a Christian value theory to defeat evils. After sketching a strategy for doing this, I answer the objection that my recommendation conflates Christian philosophy and theology, and try to show how it affords a continuity between the so-called philosophical and existential problems of evil. (shrink)

The argument that(1) God exists, and is omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly goodand(2) Evil existsare logically incompatible, can be construed aporetically (as generating a puzzle and posing the constructive challenge of finding a solution that displays their compatibility) or atheologically (as a positive proof of the non-existence of God). I note that analytic philosophers of religion over the last thirty years or so have focused on the atheological deployment of the argument from evil, and have met its onslaughts from the posture (...) of defense. I take Nelson Pike (in his article “Hume on Evil”) and Alvin Plantinga (in The Nature of Necessity, “Self-Profile,” and other pieces) as paradigm defenders, analyse their approaches, and try to make explicit parameters and assumptions within which these defenses have been conducted. In particular, both writers seem to attempt a reply within the parameters of a religion-neutral value theory and on the assumption that God has obligations to do one thing rather than another in creation-both of which conspire to defend God as a producer of global goods and shift attention off the more pressing question of His agent-centered goodness. I then argue that value-theory pluralism explodes the myth of shared values, and so complicates the structure of fair-minded debate about the problem of evil as to significantly limit the utility of defense. I invite Christian philosophers to approach the problem aporetically, and to exhibit the compossibility of (1) and (2) by formulating their own beliefs about how God is solving the problem of evil using the valuables within a Christian value theory to defeat evils. After sketching a strategy for doing this, I answer the objection that my recommendation conflates Christian philosophy and theology, and try to show how it affords a continuity between the so-called philosophical and existential problems of evil. (shrink)

Franz Brentano was a leading philosopher and psychologist of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the impact of his scholarship was so great that he became synonymous with a school of thought and a new approach in scientific philosophy. The Brentano School stood against the Idealistic and post-Kantian German tradition and Brentano played a crucial role in the founding of Austrian philosophy. He had an enormous impact on the work of Husserl and Heidegger, as well as on Moore’s _Ethics_ and Stout and (...) Russell’s analysis of mind. In particular, situated between the phenomenology movement and the analytic tradition, the concept of intentionality was redefined by Brentano and has been—and remains—a key concept of twentieth- and twentieth-first century philosophy of mind. But Brentano not only reshaped philosophy of mind; he was also a remarkable and innovative thinker in several other fields of philosophy, and recent debate in metaethics, metaphysics, and the history of analytic philosophy shows a strong resurgence of interest in Brentano’s thought. Published to coincide with the centenary of Brentano’s death, this four-volume collection, a new title from Routledge Major Works, provides an essential intellectual tool for the exegetical evaluation of all aspects of Brentano’s work. Bringing together early reviews and reactions from his contemporaries—many of which have never before been translated into English—as well as the best critical assessments of Brentano’s work, this ‘mini library’ provides Brentano scholars, historians of philosophy and psychology, and phenomenologists, with a rigorous historical appraisal of Brentano’s thought and influence. Brentano’s relationships with Husserl, Heidegger, and the phenomenological tradition are examined in depth, alongside investigations of key themes from his work on Aristotle, medieval and modern philosophy, philosophy of mind, logic, ontology, ethics, aesthetics, philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of history. (shrink)