A widespread view among contemporary philosophers and scientists is that the soul is a mystification. For Marilynne Robinson, American essayist and novelist, the crux of the matter is not the existence of the soul in itself, since this cannot be settled by debate. Rather, she challenges the sort of evidence that her opponents—mostly basing themselves on the work of neuroscientists, and evolutionary biologists—deem to be decisive in determining the question. The soul, she claims, does not appear at the level of (...) our genes and neurons. Rather it is encountered in the many works of art and reflection that human beings have produced from the earliest times. This paper will focus on one such document, Robinson’s novel Gilead, in which she proposes a vision of the soul closely allied to the notion of blessing. Blessing, in turn, is inseparable from metaphor, pointing us to mystery, an elusive reality whose presence we experience only intermittently, although it is always there. Although Robinson’s several collections of essays provide needed context for the view of the soul displayed in the novel, it is our claim that it is the novel that truly turns the tables in the debate, inviting the reader to affirm or deny the soul’s reality not on the basis of the pronouncement of experts but on the basis of the way a given language aligns with experience. The internalization that such a process requires reveals the soul in action. This paper is thus a reading of Robinson’s writings on the soul. (shrink)

Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting. By Harald Weinrich.

This essay examines the contrast between two conceptions of the universal, one represented by the modern State and the other by the Jewish people. In order to do so, it returns to the collection of essays on Judaism Levinas wrote in the approximately two decades after the Second World War, Difficult Freedom . Its aim is to focus specifically on the political dimension within this collection and then to step back and reflect on how his way of speaking of the (...) political appears to us a full generation later. As is well known, Levinas's approach to the political has a way of escaping that realm, while nonetheless remaining relevant to it. This is what we shall try to capture and to evaluate. (shrink)

In one of his last essays, "Clio--Dialogue de l'histoire et de l'âme païenne," Charles Péguy meditates at length on the human being's position in time, what he sometimes calls the secret of the man of forty. It is an inescapable secret to which all people are privy, provided they live to the requisite age. Once one knows the secret, it reshapes one's relationship to others and, as a result, what one notices about them, the evidence itself. Péguy provides several examples (...) of what historiography might look like if the historian proceeded from the secret of the man of forty. It amounts to embodying a certain solidarity with those one is investigating, based not on party affiliation, religion, nationality, race or gender, but on a common defeat in time and yet a sort of triumph within that defeat. Péguy accuses the positivists of pretending they don't know the secret of the man of forty. That is, he accuses them of willfully ignoring their own frailty. As a result, they fail to establish a common bond with the people they are studying. For Péguy, the elaboration of that common bond is prerequisite to all historical investigation. There can be no sound epistemology without it. (shrink)