This chapter contains sections titled: Hegel on Love: The Early Theological Writings Recognition and Spirit: Hegel's Appropriation and Critique of Fichte Hegel's Philosophical Theology: Love, Reconciliation, True Infinity.

The purpose of this essay is to consider the significance that Hegel grants to religious love and, with it, forgiveness in his early The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate. Although Hegel characterizes religious love in this writing as a unity that transcends reason, his association of such love with forgiveness nevertheless sheds light on an important aspect of human finitude. In this, Hegel may be seen to identify forgiveness as a form of freedom (...) elicited by limits that we encounter in practical life. The author suggests that Hegel’s approach to forgiveness, which makes use not only of themes expressed by Jesus in the Gospel but also Greek tragedy, comprises an attractive alternative to some current views. (shrink)

The article analyzes the forms of rationalism and fideism proposed by Ukrainian Protestant theologians at the beginning of the XXI century. It turns out that these forms of rationalism and fideism were made possible by overcoming the anti-intellectualism that was characteristic of Protestantism in Soviet times. The opposition of tendencies to rationalism and fideism is connected with the positioning of Ukrainian Protestants in the postmodern times. Proponents of de facto rationalism propose to reconstruct the modern religious worldview, re-synthesizing elements of (...) liberal and fundamentalist concepts. The study shows that hopes for the restoration of the modern worldview in the face of the challenges of the early XXI century contain elements of utopianism. Proponents of Fideism suggest taking full account of the real state of affairs in the postmodern era and recognizing the impossibility for Christians to use modern rationalism in all its forms. At the same time, faith acquires special significance as an expression of the personal relations of the holy people with God. Ukrainian Protestant rationalism in the article is analyzed on the example of the work of Sergei Golovin as the most consistent expression of this worldview. It has been proven that his ideas depend on the concepts of Norman Geisler, a prominent Protestant theologian. Golovin, imitating Geisler, believes that the Christian worldview should be the final superstructure over the foundation of classical logical rationalism and the ontology of being. This logic comes from classical Thomism. Golovin's rationalism is the rationalism of formal logic. Golovin's first controversial proposal is to reduce the paradoxes and contradictions contained in the Bible. Such a reduction contradicts the biblical studies of the beginning of the 21st century, and therefore can no longer be convincing for professional theologians. For ordinary believers, this reduction is an obscure rationalization of the image of God they have in reading the Scriptures. The second controversial proposition is to convert people first to logical rationality as the ideological foundation of humanity, and then to their conversion to Christianity. Such a proposal is largely outdated, because in the twentieth century it became clear that rationality in itself can be an instrument of any worldview and does not ensure the preservation or rehabilitation of humanity. By comparing it with theological practices of restoring humanity through the ethics of accepting another, the author argues that the restoration of humanity is possible through recourse to the potential of existentialist spirituality, theology of interpersonal communication, and other practical strategies of Christian theology. The biggest shortcoming of Sergei Golovin's rationalism is the proposal to build his own "scientific creationism", which denies the basic scientific theories of today. The most successful element of Golovin's system was social ethics, which offers the idea of ​​a modern state governed by the rule of law as one that can be deduced from the spirit and letter of the biblical commandments. The fideism of Ukrainian Protestant theology is born from the understanding that the ethical acceptance of others and love for them is possible only on the basis of personal faith. The challenges of the beginning of the 21st century require the acceptance of another, but individuals and communities lack the natural strength to accept such. And only faith and faith-generated love help to be open to others. Also, the post-capitalist economy of mutual gift, proposed by theologians and Christian communities, is based only on personal faith. It has been proven that the fideism of Ukrainian Protestant theology is closer to the ideas of postconservatism than the concepts of postliberalism. It has been found that radical protection of individual rights and humane treatment of others is common to the rationalism and fideism of modern Ukrainian Protestant theology. It is these ideas that are important for understanding what humanity is, which should be a prerequisite for being a true Christian. (shrink)

In recent years much attention has been devoted to Hegel’s interpretation of Greek tragedy. To be sure, authors dealing with Hegel’s understanding of tragedy have adopted different perspectives. However they do share one common basic assumption, namely, that tragedy plays a crucial role in shaping some key features of Hegel’s philosophy. This article pursues along these lines, and demonstrates that tragedy, or some aspects of tragedy, reinterpreted and reformulated, inform Hegel’s theory of ethical agency. It performs this task on the (...) basis of a reading of Hegel’s early essay The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate. (shrink)

Hegel’s treatment of Judaism in his early theological writings and his lectures on the philosophy of world history is relatively well-known. One of the best and most recent discussions of it is found in Shlomo Avineri’s paper, “The Fossil and the Phoenix: Hegel and Krochmal on the Jewish Volksgeist,” presented at the 1982 biennial meeting of the Hegel Society of America. Avineri points out that Hegel’s portrayal of Judaism in the early writings mainly followed the (...) conventional image found in traditional Christian theology. He depicted Judaism as a religion of “slavish obedience to laws” laid down not by the people themselves but by a “supreme wisdom on high,” as well as a religion of deceit, cowardice, alienation, and stubborn particularism. In one significant instance, however, Hegel deviated from these traditional stereotypes, namely, in his understanding of and sympathy for the political, national feelings of the Jews during the period of Roman subjugation prior to the destruction of the second temple. They “discarded their ineffective messianic hopes and took up arms,” resisting courageously but suffering “the most appalling of human calamities,” the loss of city and nation. “The scattered remnant of the Jews have not abandoned the idea of the Jewish state, but they have reverted not to the banners of their own courage, but only to the standards of an ineffective messianic hope.”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS The Incarnation of God: An Introduction to Hegel's Theological Thought as Prolegomena to a Future Christology. By HANS Kii'NG. Translated by J. R. Stephenson. New York: Crossroad, 1987. Pp. 601. $37.50 (cloth bound). This is an imposing book (first German edition, 1970), not only in length, but in breadth of presentation. Kiing, in the introduction, outlines the philosophical, theological and cultural milieus out of (...) which Hegel's theology and philosophy emerged. In the next 400 pages (seven chapters), Kiing thoroughly articulates the historical development of Hegel's theological and philosophical thought as expressed in his successive writings, specifically examining and evaluating the christological elements. Kiing's final chapter interprets Hegel's Christology in light of recent biblical historical/critical methodology, by way of a prolegomenon to a future Christology. The book concludes with five integral historical/theological excursus which take up specific questions that arise out of this Hegelian enterprise, for example: "Does God suffer?," "The Dialectic of the Attributes of God," "Immutability of God?". In the preface to this English edition, Kiing states that the purpose of this work is to "provide theologians with an introduction to Hegel's theological and christological thought.... [It will be] a many-leveled 'invitation' into Hegel's life and 'thought, with particular reference to his religious world, and then into his theology and Christology " (p. ix). "Moreover,.this book is an introduction to Hegel's thought by way of 'prolegomena to a future Christology '. In ·these pages we endeavour to return... a provisional reply that will take us some way in the right direction" (p. x). Why did Kiing look to Hegel for the clue to a future Christology? His thesis is that "the biblical message concerning a God who is by no means separated from the world but rather operates within it, and who is by no means stuck immovable and immutable in an unhistorical and suprahistorical realm but rather performs living acts in hi&tory can be better understood [along the lines of Hegelian thought] than in terms of the metaphysics of either classical Greece or the middle ages" (p. xii). Any student of historical or philosophical theology/christology will be captivated by Kiing's treatment of.the development of Hegel's ilhought. Undoubtedly he has mastered Hegel's life, writings and 698 694 BOOK REVIEWS thought, and presents these in a clear, complete and engaging manner. Kiing notes that Hegel, beginning with his student days at Tiihingen, was influenced by three strong cultural and intellectual currents: the Enlightenment as it specifically culminated in the thought of Kant, the French Revolution, and the rise of the Romantic movement. Kiing shows that, while the young Hegel was acquainted with the Bible, and even,though he already displayed an interest in the role of religion (folk religion) as formative of society, nowhere was he "seized in a lively and inward fashion by the Christian faith, by the figure of Christ himself" (p. 54). To rthe contrary, Hegel's early experience of Christianity was lifeless and joyless. During his subsequent time in Bern, Hegel's evaluation of Jesus un· derwent a transformation. Hegel became fascinated with Greek religion, not because it was true, but because it embodied the culture and spirit of the people. Developing this train of thought, he stated that "The supreme end of man is morality, and his religious bent is pre· eminent among his aptitudes for promoting that end" (p. 69). In light of this, Hegel considered Jesus,to lack the humane and universal scope of Socrates, who was " the paradigm of a free, good and humane Hellenism and of harmony with nature, world and state " (p. 63). Jesus' teaching was too much an authoritarian imposition upon people rarther than, like Socrates', a nurturing of their inner spirit and life. Shordy, as reflected in his Life of Jesus, Hegel's view of Jesus was to change. Now he was placed above Socrates, not because he was acknowledged to be the eternal Son of God, nor because he reconciled mankind to God by his death on the cross, but rather because he per· sonified the divine ideal of virtue that is so necessary for social order. " Whart is... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Holy Trinity in Ippolito Desideri's Ke ri se ste aṇ kyi chos lugs kyi snying poTrent PomplunOn April 10, 1716, Ippolito Desideri, a Jesuit who had but recently arrived in Tibet, wrote a long letter to another Jesuit missionary, Ildebrando Grassi, who was stationed in Mysuru, India. Desideri recounted his adventures since the two men had last been together, three and a half years earlier, at the Jesuit (...) residence in Goa. He told of his travels to Surat, Delhi, Lahore, Leh, and Lhasa, and recalled his first impressions of Tibetan religion and culture. Tibetans, he told Grassi, were gentle and docile, but coarse and uncultivated. In Desideri's opinion, they had neither arts nor sciences, but they did reject the doctrine of transmigration and appeared to have some knowledge of the Christian faith.1 "Here is what I learned about the Tibetans' religion," he wrote,They call God könchok (dkon mchog), and they appear to have some notion of the adorable Trinity, for at times they call Him könchok chik (dkon mchog gcig), that is, the One God, and at other times they call Him könchok sum (dkon mchog gsum), that is, the Triune God. They also use a kind of chaplet, over which they repeat the words Oṁ ah hūṁ, and they say that the word Oṁ signifies knowledge or an arm, that is, power; ah is the word, and hūṁ is the heart, or love, and that these three words mean God. They also worship a being named Padmasaṃbhava, who was born some seven hundred years ago. When asked if he were God or man, some people replied that he was both God and man, having neither father nor mother, but having been born from a flower. Even so, they have statues representing a woman with a flower in her hand, whom they call Padmasaṃbhava's mother, and they venerate several others whom they treat as saints. In their churches, one finds an altar covered with cloth and ornaments, and a sort of tabernacle sits in the middle of the altar, where they say Padmasaṃbhava dwells, though they also assert that he is in heaven.2This letter, which survives only in a French translation, is noteworthy if only because Ippolito Desideri would later repudiate almost everything he affirmed in it. In a matter of months, the Jesuit missionary would change his mind about Tibetans' capacities for art, for science, and for culture. He would also change his mind considerably about their religion. [End Page 117]Perhaps the most significant change—and one that would later play a large role in his legal battle with the Capuchins for control of the Tibetan mission—concerned the knowledge that Tibetans had of the Holy Trinity, the central Christian mystery that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In what follows, I would like to explore Ippolito Desideri's explanation of the Holy Trinity, especially in the Ke ri se ste aṇ kyi chos lugs kyi snying po (The Essence of Christian Doctrine). I will briefly situate Desideri's account of Tibetans' knowledge of the Trinity in the general historical and theological context of the early modern missions, outline his various attempts to explain this central Christian mystery in Tibetan, and offer some tentative speculations on the Jesuit's motives for choosing certain Tibetan terms. I hope this discussion of Desideri's treatment of the Holy Trinity might contribute to Christian theologians and Buddhist philosophers who are engaged in interreligious dialogue and assist them in their reflections about how best to translate their respective faiths in such dialogue. Desideri's translations are not always perspicacious—as we shall see—but they are instructive, especially to the extent that they show us the issues that must be considered when anyone wishes to translate the basic terms of his own religion into an alien language. With this difficulty in mind, we might also consider the inadequacy of all language, human or angelic, when confronted with the mystery of God's infinite transcendence.Ippolito Desideri in ContextBefore addressing Desideri's translations, I would like to point out that the description of Tibetan religion... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Origen and Prophecy: Fate, Authority, Allegory, and the Structure of Scripture by Claire HallMilanna FritzOrigen and Prophecy: Fate, Authority, Allegory, and the Structure of Scripture by Claire Hall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 195 pp.Origen's (AD 185–255) surviving corpus is studied by scholars across the disciplines of theology philosophy and classics. Drawing from each of these fields, in Origen and Prophecy, Clare Hall applies Origen's self-proposed tripartite exegesis (...) of Scripture, in which verses can be read at a "somatic, psychic, or pneumatic level," to his conceptualization of prophecy [End Page 293] (193). Hall's argument examines the "landscape of pagan, Jewish, and early Christian religiosity" and considers the "whole range of Origen's corpus" in relation to "wider structures and themes in his work" (4, 25). In doing so, Hall presents a compelling analysis embedding Origen's system of exegesis and theology of prophecy within the intellectual history of prophecy in the late classical and early Christian world.In her first few chapters, Hall explores Origen's definitions of prophecy in relation to its Jewish and Greco-Roman influences and his system of scriptural exegesis. Hall remains cognizant of terminology used by classical authors as she describes Origen's word choice, noting, for instance, that he varies his language most when the prophetic validity of the author is in question (9–12). She summarizes Greek, Roman, and Jewish conceptualizations of prophecy, then turns to Scripture and early Christian texts, all of which shape Origen's own "notions of wisdom, knowledge, and prophecy" (20, 29). Hall argues that Origen's On First Principles and homilies on Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers are underlaid by a coherent exegetical system. Further, she explains, Origen's Commentary on the Song of Songs applies this same system to other forms of knowledge, including prophecy, which has a future-telling sense, a moral sense, and a mystical and revelatory sense (27, 50, 39–45). In her analysis, Hall provides insight into the philosophical and theological foundations for the "revelatory potential of allegory" as understood by Origen and other early Christian authors and carefully distinguishes Origen's own beliefs from the tenets of Origenism (30–31). To strengthen her argument, Hall cites a plethora of secondary scholars on Origen, including Caroline Bammel, Gunnar af Hällström, Robert Hauck, and Ilaria Ramelli (18–25).In her next few chapters, Hall unfolds Origen's system of distinguishing between true and false prophets and his advocacy for the unity of prophecy within Scripture in his response to Marcionism (199, 149–52). Chief among Hall's insightful contributions, however, is her treatment of the complex interrelation of prophecy and human autonomy: within Origen's framework, how does providential foreknowledge permit human free choice? To approach an answer, Hall traces the emerging conception of free will as "freedom of decision" among Greek authors such as Aristotle, Chrysippus and the Stoics, the Platonists, the Epicureans, and Alexander of Aphrodisias, who, she argues, laid the groundwork for Origen's "innovative narrative understanding of free will" in the context of "epistemological considerations surrounding prophecy" (55–71, 75). These sections of her book present a striking glimpse into early Christian departure from the Greek classical tradition, and her exploration of Origen's defense of both free will and [End Page 294] divine foreknowledge opens the door to further research on his theology of conversion and the relation between grace and nature (75–85, 91).While the entirety of her work is thought-provoking, some elements of Hall's presentation of Origen's theology may be open to a critical response by patristic scholars. Throughout her work, Hall consistently characterizes Origen's spiritual readings of Scripture—and prophecy—in direct opposition to its literal readings. For instance, she writes that, for Origen, just as "some verses do not have a somatic reading and cannot be taken literally," some prophecies are intended to be read as "stumbling blocks or riddles for the exegete to ponder," rather than accurate or "coherent" predictions of the future (193, 53). Additionally, Hall ties Origen's insights on prophecy in the Old Testament to his depiction of Christ as the "ultimate content of... (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name for (...) threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Dialectic and Gospel in the Development of Hegel’s Thinking by Stephen CritesLawrence S. StepelevichStephen Crites. Dialectic and Gospel in the Development of Hegel’s Thinking. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. Pp. xvii + 572. Cloth, $65.00Unlike either Wittgenstein or Heidegger, or his contemporary, Schelling, there is really no “Early” or “Later” Hegel. The fundamentals of his system were, if not always fully articulated, nevertheless present from (...) the very beginning of his career. There is, in Hegel, a remarkable consistency in the development of his thought, in which the elements that comprised his final system can be detected in his earliest efforts—and it is only in this sense that one can speak of an “Early” or a “Later” Hegel. That his final expression was indeed the result of an effort, a struggle to fuse and clarify seemingly disparate elements, is the thesis of Professor Crites. In this case, the specific disparate elements that are considered are those which confronted Hegel from his earliest days as a student of theology, those elements expressed in the “Christian Drama.” Crites sets out the eight revered acts of this drama: the creation, the fall, God’s covenant with Israel, the incarnation, the death and resurrection of Christ, the Holy Spirit, the mission of the Church, and the last judgment. It is his contention that Hegel “critically engaged the claims of this mythos and the social practices associated with it.” And so, the essence of Crites’s well-written and well-researched study is to set out how this drama served as a “template that affected the way he framed other topics in the ever-widening range of his philosophical inquiry.” It is to his credit that Crites does not consider his own explication of Hegel’s preoccupation with the gospels as some sort of a “secret” key that could unlock the full meaning of Hegel’s philosophy, but nevertheless, as he rightly stresses, this preoccupation cannot be ignored—for it ultimately exercised a crucial role in the formation of that which is now taken as Hegel’s mature thought.Unlike most studies of Hegel’s development—and there are more than a few—Crites avoids taking a retrospective posture, a concluding a priori stance which would allow him to point out where and why this or that particular element was rejected or retained by Hegel, His method is historical, intent upon following Hegel’s own sometimes tortured development, until, finally in this course, we reach a point where we suddenly see that Hegel “shows clear signs of becoming what we can only call a Hegelian—or better still, he shows signs of being Hegel!”The source of this inner development begins, and is traced from, Hegel’s initial appearance as “The Model Pupil of Stuttgart” to that moment in when he stands revealed as embodying that Absolute Knowledge which concludes the Phenomenology. This path from Stuttgart to Jena, which Hegel himself might have had in mind when he spoke of the philosophical “highway of despair” is detailed by Crites with a sure hand. Every stumbling block is noted, and every new resolution ıs marked, from those first essays composed during the bitter days as Hauslehrer, through the steady advances [End Page 540] of “the Jena ‘Philosophy’ ” until the passage completes itself in the Phenomenology and its termination in the “Recollection and the Golgotha of Absolute Spirit.”More than half of Crites’ extensive study is devoted to explicating how the subject of religion is dealtwith in the course of the Phenomenology. In this survey of Hegel’s most well-known work, its fundamental leitmotif emerges clearly into focus: the identification of the “portentous power of the negative” with the Death of God. This death, which is philosophically reflected in dialectical negativity, is the central moment of the gospel drama. In this act, Absolute Spirit must itself suffer and die, for “Not only the Christian God incarnate, but the absolute spirit suffers, suffers its Golgotha and dies.” It is only from this sacrifice that new life can arise—for out of it comes “the resurrection of a new human-divine totality.” What Hegel has retained of the gospel... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Cognition: An Introduction to Hegel's Phenomenology of SpiritJohn RussonTom Rockmore. Cognition: An Introduction to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Pp vii + 247. Cloth, $40.00.Rockmore's book is an argument that Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is a rigorous and systematic argument about epistemology (2) and it is a commentary designed to introduce students to the details of Hegel's (...) text (1). The epistemological thesis is stated most concisely in Chapter 9. Chapters 1 through 8 comment on the Phenomenology at something close to a paragraph-by-paragraph level, (in the form of Findlay's appendix to the Miller translation of the Phenomenology).Rockmore's thesis is that Hegel's epistemology is an "anti-foundationalism without [End Page 131] scepticism" (215), or a "tertiary empiricism," (197): following Kant, Hegel holds that all knowledge begins with, but does not arise from, experience, but, against Kant, Hegel maintains that knowledge does not relate to anything beyond experience, but is itself the ultimate or absolute object (3). The "Consciousness" section of the Phenomenology establishes this basic position in three stages: "Sense-Certainty" refutes sense-data empiricism; "Perception" shows that knowing what an object is requires the mind's mediation; "Understanding" shows that no successful theory of the unity of the cognitive object can be accomplished in an epistemology that maintains the independence of the object of cognition, (a "thing-in-itself"), and that epistemology must thus shift its focus from object to subject. The "Self-Consciousness" chapter demonstrates that the subject of knowledge must be self-conscious and free, and therefore social and historical. Hegel's great contribution to epistemology is thus to replace the "minimalist" subject of Early Modern epistemology with the "thick" subjectivity of "social human being" (4, 201, 208). The analysis of this "thick" subject is carried out through the "Reason" chapter, (which shows that abstract reason cannot account for the whole of the human subject), and especially the "Spirit" chapter, (though this latter is "perhaps also the most defective part of the Phenomenology" [204]). The "Religion" chapter shows human religious history to be faulty epistemology, that is, an attempt to know that fails because of religion's non-conceptual formulation of its own significance. "Absolute Knowing" rectifies this problem by putting religion's (Christianity's) own ultimate truth—that God is Spirit—into conceptual form in the recognition that human social experience is the absolute. While Rockmore's overall thesis is reasonable, there is much to argue with in the specifics.Kant's philosophy is indisputably a central concern in the Phenomenology, but Rockmore sees Kant in every central move of the book. In his treatment of the "Introduction" and "Consciousness" this is more misleading than helpful (37-8). In discussing the "Introduction," Rockmore helpfully shows that consciousness is a self-comparison, but is weak in discussing the "in-itself." The discussion of "Consciousness" is likewise weak in its treatment of textual specifics, but does assert a reasonable interpretation of this section as a refutation of immediate knowledge that demonstrates the problems of reconciling unity and diversity in objects of experience, and the need for a science of subjectivity.Rockmore portrays the "Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness" as establishing that freedom is to be found in equal recognition, a social situation that is not yet established (70-2). "The Freedom of Self-Consciousness" shows the inadequacy of abstract, individualistic conceptions of freedom (76, 202). Here again, Rockmore's claims are more overlain on the text than derived from it. The treatment of the "Freedom of Self-Consciousness" is disappointing in failing to recognize a systematic character to Hegel's study. Indeed, while claiming to defend Hegel against charges of non-rigorous, non-systematic idiosyncracy (195), Rockmore is surprisingly inattentive to the systematic shape of Hegel's argument.In discussing "Reason," Rockmore again treats Kant as Hegel's major antagonist. His introduction to the "Reason" chapter is helpful, but his treatment of "Observing Reason" suffers from lack of attention to Schelling's philosophy of nature, and lack of historical precision in the discussion of Early Modern science and philosophy. The [End Page 132] discussions of the later... (shrink)

This study focuses on the interrelation of freedom, finitude, and reconciliation in Hegel?s understanding of religion. These three moments are found at central stages of Hegel?s treatment of the religious, from Hegel?s early fragments to his mature work. Finitude taking shape in the religious phenomena of a tragic fate, sin, or more generally, failing, is central to Hegel?s philosophical understanding of one-sidedness. As finite, man needs to reconcile with the other, and only as reconciled does he achieve freedom. (...) Hegel credits Christianity with the discovery of the primary essences of spirituality: freedom and forgiveness. Freedom is intensified with the death of God: man realizes that there is no God-given, only man-made, legislation. This deepening of freedom does not overcome man?s finitude but instead intensifies it along with a heightened sense for responsibility, and an increased potential for guilt. In this context, forgiveness is the highest spiritual capacity of modern man, whose fate is to bear the freedom of oneself and the other. nema. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Seneca, Ethics, and the Body: The Treatment of Cruelty in Medieval ThoughtDaniel BarazIn an impassioned article written in 1941 Lucien Febvre urges the writing of a history of human sensibility and suggests in particular writing a history of cruelty. 1 The general direction indicated by Febvre has been followed, but as far as cruelty is concerned his plea is still as relevant today as it was five decades (...) ago. And since cruelty is one of the attributes commonly associated with the Middle Ages, 2 it is particularly interesting to examine what and how medieval thinkers wrote on the subject.An examination of sources dealing with cruelty from late antiquity to the early modern period yields surprising results. Whereas the writings of the thinkers of late classical antiquity and of the early modern period do include discussions of the issue, the writings of medieval thinkers before the thirteenth century contain only brief remarks. The first and only exception until the end of the Middle Ages is a short question on cruelty in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae. Other types of medieval sources, such as legal texts, chronicles, and literary texts, reveal the same scarcity of references to the subject during most of the Middle Ages. Thus this period seems to represent a gap between antiquity and the early modern period, with a reawakening of interest in the issue of cruelty towards the end of the Middle Ages.The relative silence of medieval sources calls for identifying the factors which affected the treatment of cruelty by medieval thinkers. What are the [End Page 195] reasons for the neglect of the subject as well as for the late revival of interest in it? And when the issue is discussed, what factors shape the discussion? Two issues seem crucial to me in answering these questions: the conception of the relation between body and soul and the relative weight given to actions vs. intentions in the dominant ethical framework. A third issue, of equal importance, provides a focus for the investigation of the treatment of cruelty in the Middle Ages and the factors affecting it; and this is the reception of Seneca. As interest in Seneca’s writings grew, so did the preoccupation with cruelty. There is a close thematic interaction between these two processes, beyond the chrono-logical coincidence.Most obviously, discussions of cruelty as a subject per se referred explicitly to Seneca’s writings on the subject. Less directly, when cruelty was treated only in passing in the context of the Christian tradition, the manner in which the subject was addressed reflected a lack of Senecan influence, so that Seneca’s influence was felt through its absence. Nevertheless, the Christian tradition continued to influence references to cruelty even after the revival of Senecan influence during the high Middle Ages and to a certain degree even served as a filter, determining which aspects of Seneca’s writings on cruelty were used.Thomas Aquinas and SenecaThe first medieval discussion of cruelty as a subject per se is the question De crudelitate (2-2-159) in the section on temperance in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae. Aquinas bases his discussion almost exclusively on classical sources, primarily Seneca’s De clementia. 3 Seneca referred to cruelty in detail both in this work and in another moral essay, De ira. His De clementia was written at the beginning of Nero’s reign, and it is addressed to the young emperor, his former pupil. Its stated aim is to praise Nero for possessing the quality of clementia, and to show how important this quality is for rulers. 4 The concept of clementia describes a quality of political men, the term having acquired political significance since the times of Caesar and Augustus. 5De clementia was written before most of the actions which earned Nero his reputation were perpetrated; the only concrete action which may have inspired Seneca to write it was the murder of Britannicus, of which Nero was suspected. Regardless, the emperors preceding Nero were certainly not renowned for their [End Page 196] clemency. Suetonius tells that one of Caligula’s amusements was to attend sessions of torture and execution; that he insisted on slow... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Earthquake of 1906, the Christian Anarchy of Dorothy Day, and the Opened “Tomb” of René GirardAnn W. Astell (bio)The autobiographical writings of Dorothy Day (1897–1980) feature a childhood memory of catastrophe and conversion, her traumatic experience at age eight of the earthquake that rocked San Francisco and Oakland in 1906, leaving half of San Francisco in ruins and sending 50,000 refugees in flight from the burning city, many (...) of them in ferries across the bay. Day’s observations of the spontaneous behavior of people who helped one another at that time of crisis guided her later in dealing with the great crash of 1929 and the subsequent economic depression, during which, in 1933, she cofounded with Peter Maurin (1877–1949) the Catholic Worker Movement and its many Houses of Hospitality.Day’s experience of an anti-sacrificial civilization of love emerging spontaneously out of a chaotic situation of social crisis seems to challenge René Girard’s theory of the scapegoat-mechanism as the normative way of restoring order and peace to a community whose very existence is threatened by anarchy. A closer examination of Day’s experience and social thought in conversation with Girard’s reveals that Girard and Day agree about the violent origins of all culture, which Day envisages as revealed by an earthquake, Girard as concealed by a tomb—related foundational images that, as we shall see, Scripture scholars [End Page 19] find collocated especially in the final chapters of the Gospel according to St. Matthew. The difference between the two images—one natural and one man-made—should not, and indeed cannot, be overlooked, however. The earthquake and its social effect as observable phenomena force the consideration that Girard’s early formulations of his theory, which explicitly distanced it from naturalistic explanations of myth, need to be revised in a way that accords more closely with his own later, apocalyptic thought.In an article published recently in Contagion, Matthew Pattillo has shown that Girard’s writings parallel, and to some extent directly affected, those of Jacques Ellul,1 the noted Christian anarchist who cites Girard explicitly on occasion and whose many books, according to Mark and Louise Zwick, “influenced the later Catholic Worker Movement.”2 In this article, I follow Pattillo’s lead, going back in time in order to examine ways in which the mimetic theory of Girard illumines the early thought and practice of Day, highlighting the originality of Day’s Christian anarchism as a remedy for a culture founded on violence. Whereas Girard posits a prereligious phase of anarchic, contagious violence, to which the rituals and prohibitions of religious societies responded (thus distantly preparing the way for a secularized modernity in which “law and order” stand opposed to an ever-threatening “anarchy”), Day finds a freely chosen Christian anarchy the best cure for anarchic destruction and totalitarianism alike, thus forging what Pattillo calls a “‘third way’ beyond law, beyond morality, beyond chaos.”3 In the end, the prolonged crisis within which the Catholic Workers shape their anarchistic “new society” against an eschatological horizon confirms Girard’s apocalypticism, even as it serves to place it in conversation with the apocalyptic philosophy of history of the Russian philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev (1874–1949), whose thought influenced Maurin and Day.4The Earthquake and the TombFor Girard, the tomb is the real and metaphoric evolutionary origin of human civilization. “Culture,” he writes,always develops as a tomb. The tomb is nothing but the first human monument to be raised over the surrogate victim, the first, most elemental and fundamental matrix of meaning. There is no culture without a tomb, and no tomb without a culture; in the end, the tomb is the first and only [End Page 20] cultural symbol. The above-ground tomb does not have to be invented. It is the pile of stones in which the victim of unanimous stoning is buried.5Moving from its literal, historical meaning in connection with a primeval murder, Girard elaborates the metaphorical significance of the tomb for culture as a whole. As a site serving two functions simultaneously—namely, those of honoring the dead and of concealing a corpse—the tomb... (shrink)

Hegel only published five books in his lifetime, and among them the Phenomenology of Spirit emerges as the most important but also perhaps the most difficult and complex. In this book Ludwig Siep follows the path from Hegel's early writings on religion, love and spirit to the milestones of his 'Jena period'. He shows how the themes of the Phenomenology first appeared in an earlier work, The Difference between Fichte's and Schelling's Systems of (...) Philosophy, and closely examines the direction which Hegel's thought took as he attempted to think through the possibility of a complete system of philosophy. The themes encompassed by the Phenomenology – anti-dualistic epistemology, autonomy, historicality, the sociality of reason – are thoroughly discussed in Siep's subtle and elegantly argued assessment, which appears here in English for the first time. It will be of great interest to all readers studying Hegel's thought. (shrink)

In 2020 the international philosophical community celebrates the 250th anniversary of the birth of G.W.F. Hegel. This anniversary provides an excellent opportunity to once again reconsider to the iconic works of the great German philosopher, among them, special attention should be paid to The Phenomenology of the Spirit, which is universally considered as one of the most famous works of world philosophical literature. Being the first of Hegel’s major works and, at the same time, the first and only (...) part of the early version of his system of absolute idealism, this book, largely due to the efforts of the French Neo-Hegelians, acquired the status of one of the most famous philosophical works. Meanwhile, The Phenomenology of the Spirit is rightfully considered one of the most complex philosophical texts, which does not cease to attract attention, including due to the intricacies of its style. Being called by K. Marx “the true point of origin and the secret of the Hegelian philosophy,” this work, among other numerous “secrets” and “mysteries,” undoubtedly hides the mystery associated with the terminological and stylistic features of Hegel’s writing. Noting the serious difficulties encountered in reading The Phenomenology of the Spirit, the author of the article shows that Hegel wrote it, developing a new philosophical language, creating a range of linguistic innovations, also using Germanized Latin and Greek terms. Along with Spinoza’s Latin terminology, he borrowed some concepts from his compatriots, deliberately altering their meaning. The article also shows that, being an extremely complex philosophical work, Hegel’s The Phenomenology of the Spirit had a huge impact on the development of intellectual culture of the 20th century, and not only due to its conceptions. Its language itself greatly contributed to the formation of special philosophical terminology and anticipated a number of significant changes in the structure and composition of philosophical texts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:An Introduction to Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Issue of Religious Content in the Enlightenment and Romanticism by Jon StewartMichael RohlfAn Introduction to Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Issue of Religious Content in the Enlightenment and Romanticism. By Jon Stewart. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. xi + 304. $100.00 (hardcover). ISBN: 978-0-19-284293-0.The interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy of religion is notoriously controversial (...) for several reasons. One such reason, indicated by Jon Stewart at the outset of his new introduction to the subject, is that while Hegel’s views on religion are intricately interwoven with the rest of his philosophical system, the political climate in Prussia at the time was such that “Hegel was guarded with respect to issues of religion and took some care to dissemble his true views” (2). A second reason is that although the texts Hegel published during his lifetime contain scattered discussions of religion, his only systematic treatment of religion occurs in his Berlin Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (LPR), which were published after his death in several editions, each of which drew upon different selections from student lecture notes and [End Page 688] Hegel’s own notes (he lectured on the philosophy of religion or proofs of God’s existence in five different semesters between 1821 and 1831), and each of which has been criticized for presenting only a partial picture of Hegel’s views on the subject. Stewart explains that the first edition of these lectures in particular, published in 1832 as part of the first complete edition of Hegel’s works, “was in many ways the key text that caused the split among... the schools of right and left Hegelianism” (15). Critics complained that this edition made Hegel look more orthodox than he actually was (16), but so-called right Hegelians defended Hegel’s philosophy as in fact consistent with orthodox Christian doctrines, while left Hegelians argued that Hegel’s philosophy “undermined or demystified Christianity” (202).Stewart’s book is an accessible and admirably neutral introduction to the philosophical context, content, and reception of Hegel’s LPR. Its scope and Stewart’s pellucid prose make it an excellent overview for readers coming to this material for the first time, while its detailed discussions of the publication history and reception of Hegel’s LPR and its thorough references make the book a valuable resource for more advanced students and scholars as well. Stewart’s approach is to frame Hegel’s philosophy of religion as a response to criticisms of religion in the Enlightenment and to Romanticism in Hegel’s own day. Accordingly, the book’s first two chapters provide context by discussing Enlightenment debates about religion in Voltaire, Reimarus, Lessing, Hume, and Kant, along with Hegel’s critical response to the Enlightenment. Chapter 3 then presents Rousseau as a forerunner, and Jacobi and Schleiermacher as representatives, of the Romantic approach to religion in Hegel’s own day. After discussing Hegel’s general method in LPR and the relation between philosophy and religion in chapter 4, Stewart turns to Hegel’s philosophical accounts of pre-Christian religions in chapter 5, of Christianity in chapter 6, and of Islam in chapter 7. Since Hegel’s account in LPR ends before the rise of Islam, Stewart draws primarily on Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History in chapter 7. Chapter 8 is, in this reviewer’s opinion, the most valuable part of the book, where Stewart summarizes and weighs in on debates in the 1830s and 1840s about the consistency or inconsistency of Hegel’s views with Christian doctrines of immortality, the personhood of God, and the divinity of Christ. The book then closes with a final chapter about the relevance of Hegel’s philosophy of religion today.Stewart indicates two distinctive features of his interpretation in the book’s introduction, where he references the tendency of scholars to assume that Hegel “kept secret his true views about religion” (13). On Stewart’s reading, there are really two related secrets concealed within Hegel’s texts about religion. First, while Hegel is quite explicit that “his... (shrink)

In the concept of "gift," some contemporary thinkers perceive the possibility for a renewal of philosophical and theological reflection. The Parisian philosopher Claude Bruaire innovately proposes to understand "gift" ontologically rather than phenomenologically or sociologically. The purpose of this dissertation is to explore Bruaire's ontology of gift , while testing its ability to elaborate an adequate interpretation of the essence of finite and infinite spirit. ;Bruaire views gift and being as coextensive for two reasons. First, he interprets being (...) in terms of spirit and of freedom. Gift then is the name of the ternary freedom-spirit-being. Second, being-of-spirit is gift because God is not only absolute spirit, he is also Triune. ;The first part of the dissertation explains how, for Bruaire, the intimation of Christian revelation enhances philosophy and suggests the elaboration of an ontology of spirit. We then proceed to show in what way, prior to the development of his ontodology , Bruaire's systematic anthropology and his conception of absolute spirit were built around a notion of gift which was yet to be developed fully. In the course of this discussion the necessity for an ontological account of gift emerges clearly. ;The second part unfolds Bruaire's ontodology in three steps. We first of all recount how the retrieval of the concept of spirit enables Bruaire to restore the notion of being to philosophical reflection. We then explain in what way the human spirit is given to the self in order to become self. Finally, we show that, for Bruaire, the infinite, creator, and eternal spirit is gift because God is donation , reddition , and confirmation of the gift . Entering in conversation with the philosophy of Hegel and Schelling, Bruaire draws from German Idealism key themes and terms, and corrects them in the light of the principle of unfathomable positivity stemming from his comprehension of Christianity. This approach enables him to develop a cogent interpretation of being as love. (shrink)

Such love, though it expends itself in generosity and thoughtfulness, though it give birth to visions and to great poetry, remains among the sharpest expressions of self-interest. Not until it has passed through a long servitude, through its own self-hatred, through mockery, through great doubts, can it take its place among the loyalties.most readers will be at least generally familiar with the details of Hegel’s so-called struggle for recognition, his account of the emergence of communal life in chapter (...) 4 of the Phenomenology of Spirit. “Consciousness,” the argument’s protagonist, at a certain stage interprets its desire for wisdom as a desire for the regard of another; it first tries to secure it by forcing the.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Eucharistic Form of God: Trinity, Incarnation, and Sacrament in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar by Jonathan Martin CirauloNicholas J. HealyThe Eucharistic Form of God: Trinity, Incarnation, and Sacrament in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar. By Jonathan Martin Ciraulo. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022. Pp. xiii + 297. $50.00 (hardcover). ISBN: 978-0-268-20223-1.In Fides et Ratio 93, under the heading “current (...) tasks for theology,” John Paul II writes:The chief purpose of theology is to provide an understanding of Revelation and the content of faith. The very heart of theological enquiry will thus be the contemplation of the mystery of the Triune God. The approach to this mystery begins with reflection upon the mystery of the Incarnation of the Son of God: his coming as man, his going to his Passion and Death.... From this vantage-point, the prime commitment of theology is seen to be the understanding of God’s kenosis, a grand and mysterious truth for the human mind, which finds it inconceivable that suffering and death can express a love which gives itself and seeks nothing in return. In this light, a careful analysis of texts emerges as a basic and urgent need: first the texts of Scripture, and then those which express the Church’s living Tradition. On this score, some problems have emerged in recent times, problems which are only partially new; and a coherent solution to them will not be found without philosophy’s contribution.These words about the mystery of Jesus Christ’s life and death as a revelation of the Triune God—and about the emergence of new difficulties and questions—underscore the importance of a dialogue between St. Thomas Aquinas and the great twentieth-century theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar. As two recent books written from a Thomistic perspective have shown (Aidan Nicholas, Balthasar for Thomists [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2020]); [End Page 715] Matthew Levering, The Achievement of Hans Urs von Balthasar [Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2019]), Balthasar’s profound indebtedness to the metaphysics of Aquinas provides a solid foundation for dialogue. And yet a number of difficulties remain. What is the relationship between the so-called real distinction of esse and essence and the hypostatic union of two natures in the person of the Son? How and in what sense does the paschal mystery of Jesus’s death and Resurrection presuppose and express the mystery of the Father’s eternal generation of the Son? In the words of Joseph Ratzinger, “in the pierced heart of the Crucified, God’s own heart is opened up—here we see who God is and what he is like” (Spirit of the Liturgy [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000], 48). How does the mystery of Christ’s Eucharist reveal the heart of God?This last question about the Eucharist and the nature of God is explored in depth in Jonathan Martin Ciraulo’s monograph, The Eucharistic Form of God: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Sacramental Theology. Despite the expansive title, the primary aim of this book is fairly straightforward: to present Balthasar’s theology of the Eucharist and to show the significance of his thought for contemporary sacramental theology. Anyone who seeks to offer a systematic account of Balthasar’s theology of the Eucharist is confronted with at least two basic obstacles or challenges. First, his reflections on the Eucharist are scattered throughout (and often hidden within) an immense and complex corpus of writings. Second, the most distinctive feature of Balthasar’s theology of the Eucharist is the inseparability of his sacramental theology from his speculative account of the central mysteries of the Christian faith—Trinity, Incarnation, Cross and Resurrection, Church, and eschaton.The Eucharistic Form of God represents a thoughtful, well-written, and original response to this twofold challenge. Regarding the first point: Ciraulo demonstrates an intimate familiarity with the whole of Balthasar’s corpus. He draws together Balthasar’s early writings on German literature, his monographs on Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus the Confessor, his engagement with Karl Barth, his interpretation of twentieth-century French Catholic literature... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 21.1 (2001) v-vi [Access article in PDF] In Memoriam: Wilfred Cantwell Smith Wilfred Cantwell Smith, a Canadian who taught for most of the first half of his career at McGill University in Montreal and for most of the second half at Harvard, died February 7, 2000, in his native Toronto at the age of eighty-three. His wife and companion of sixty years, Muriel, survives him, (...) as do five children and a dozen grandchildren.Smith, a Protestant Christian and clergyman, played an influential role among both academics and church bodies in advocating open dialogue and personal encounter with the adherents of diverse religious traditions. As one of his students, Professor John Ross Carter of Colgate University, put it, "Before I met Wilfred, I had studied Buddhism as a system. Under him, I came to appreciate the faith of Buddhists as persons."As an undergraduate, Smith studied Middle Eastern languages at the University of Toronto. He then studied theology in Cambridge, England, and taught during the early 1940s at Forman Christian College, Lahore, in what was then India but is now Pakistan. He became involved in the vital contemporary life of Muslims, and in the Hindu-Muslim-Sikh interface in the Punjab. The partition of India along communal lines in 1947 reinforced his strong sense of the moral urgency of interreligious understanding.After completing a Ph.D. degree at Princeton University with a dissertation on modern Islam, Smith took up the chair of comparative religion in McGill University's Faculty of Divinity and soon organized McGill's Institute of Islamic Studies, which he directed until 1963. The institute was innovative in two respects. First, it treated Islam as the faith of millions in southern Asia today, where the numerical majority of Muslims live, in contrast with the emphasis of most Orientalist scholarship on classical Arabic, Persian, and Turkish literature. Second, it strove to include roughly equal numbers of Muslims and Westerners in both its faculty and its student body.Though he had already made seminal contributions to comparative studies, Smith moved fully into that realm when in 1964 he took over the directorship of Harvard Divinity School's Center for the Study of World Religions, and later, of Harvard's entire graduate program in religion in arts and sciences. Through two decades, until his 1984 retirement, the world religions Ph.D. graduates emerging from Harvard, including a significant cohort of specialists in Buddhist studies, were inspired by Smith to focus on the faith dimension of the traditions they studied.Religious bodies turned to Smith for scholarly advice. To take one important example, he served in 1967 on a commission on world mission of the United Church of Canada. As a result of his input, the commission's report, adopted by the denomination, [End Page v] affirmed God to be working creatively and redemptively in the religious traditions of humankind. Some view this as the first declaration by any church to go so far in the entire history of Christianity.Numerous responsibilities and honors came to Smith. He became president of practically every organization to which he belonged, such as the American Academy of Religion, the American Society for the Study of Religion (which he said was his favorite), the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion, and the Canadian Theological Society. His writings have been translated into many languages, as diverse as Spanish, Turkish, Urdu, and Korean. He received a dozen honorary degrees, was elected to the Royal Society of Canada, and less than a month before the end of his life was inducted in a special bedside ceremony as an Officer of the Order of Canada, the nearest honor that country has to a title of nobility awarded for merit.Smith was primarily a historian, ever fascinated by process and change. He observed it not only in the societies and traditions of world culture, but in the conceptual vocabulary with which we describe it. His landmark book, from this point of view, is TheMeaning and End of Religion(1963), in which he traced both the emergence of the view of particular traditions... (shrink)

continent. 1.1 : 3-13. / 0/ – Introduction I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville's Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy which has followed, (...) has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant's prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” And while Alain Badiou would certainly be opposed to the libidinal investments of Land's Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, he is likewise critical of Kant's normative thought-bureaucracies: Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism—always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’—combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism. I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it. An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle's non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world. [1] Beyond this, the Kantian scheme of nestling human thinking between our limited empirical powers and transcendental guarantees of categorical coherence, forms of thinking which stretch beyond either appear illegitimate, thereby liquefying both pre-critical metaphysics and the ravings of the mad in the same critical acid. In rejecting the Kantian apparatus we are left with two entities – an unsure relation of thought to reality where thought is susceptible to internal and external breakdown and a reality with an uncertain sense of stability. These two strands will be pursued, against the sane-seal of post-Kantian philosophy by engaging the work of weird fiction authors H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The absolute inhumanism of the formers universe will be used to describe a Shoggothic Materialism while the dream worlds of the latter will articulate the mad speculation of a Ventriloquil Idealism. But first we must address the relation of philosophy to madness as well as philosophy to weird fiction. /1/ – Philosophy and Madness There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored. Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization. The moment I doubt whether an event that I recall actually took place, I bring the suspicion of madness upon myself: unless I am uncertain as to whether it was not a mere dream. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3. Madness is commonly thought of as moving through several well known cultural-historical shifts from madness as a demonic or otherwise theological force, to rationalization, to medicalization psychiatric and otherwise. Foucault's Madness and Civilization is well known for orientating madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. Yet Foucault points to the possibility of madness as the necessity of nature at least prior to the crushing weight of the church. Kant’s philosophy as a response to madness is grounded by his humanizing of madness itself. As Adrian Johnston points out in the early pages of Time Driven pre-Kantian madness meant humans were seized by demonic or angelic forces whereas Kantian madness became one of being too human. Madness becomes internalized, the external demonic forces become flaws of the individual mind. Foucault argues that, while madness is de-demonized it is also dehumanized during the Renaissance, as madmen become creatures neither diabolic nor totally human reduced to the zero degree of humanity. It is immediately clear why for Kant, speculative metaphysics must be curbed – with the problem of internal madness and without the external safeguards of transcendental conditions, there is nothing to formally separate the speculative capacities for metaphysical diagnosis from the mad ramblings of the insane mind – both equally fall outside the realm of practicality and quotidian experience. David-Menard's work is particularly useful in diagnosing the relation of thought and madness in Kant's texts. David-Menard argues that in Kant's relatively unknown “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” as well as his later discussion of the Seer of Swedenborg, that Kant formulates madness primarily in terms of sensory upheaval or other hallucinatory theaters. She writes: “madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas” Kant's fascination with the Seer forces Kant between the pincers of “aesthetic reconciliation” – namely melancholic withdrawal – and “a philosophical invention” – namely the critical project. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis is a combination and reversal of Kant's split, where an aesthetic over engagement with the world entails prolific conceptual invention. Their embrace of madness, however, is of course itself conceptual despite all their rhizomatic maneuvers. Though they move with the energy of madness, Deleuze and Guattari save the capacity of thought from the fangs of insanity by imbuing materiality itself with the capacity for thought. Or, as Ray Brassier puts it, “Deleuze insists, it is necessary to absolutize the immanence of this world in such a way as to dissolve the transcendent disjunction between things as we know them and as they are in themselves”. That is, whereas Kant relied on the faculty of judgment to divide representation from objectivity Deleuze attempts to flatten the whole economy beneath the juggernaut of ontological univocity. Speculation, as a particularly useful form of madness, might fall close to Deleuze and Guattari’s shaping of philosophy into a concept producing machine but is different in that it is potentially self destructive – less reliant on the stability of its own concepts and more adherent to exposing a particular horrifying swath of reality. Speculative madness is always a potential disaster in that it acknowledges little more than its own speculative power with the hope that the gibbering of at least a handful of hysterical brains will be useful. Pre-critical metaphysics amounts to madness, though this may be because the world itself is mad while new attempts at speculative metaphysics, at post-Kantian pre-critical metaphysics, are well aware of our own madness. Without the sobriety of the principle of sufficient reason we have a world of neon madness: “we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of things”. Speculative thought may be participatory in the screaming tumult of the world or, worse yet, may produce its spectral double. Against theology or reason or simply commonsense, the speculative becomes heretical. Speculation, as the cognitive extension of the horrorific sublime should be met with melancholic detachment. Whereas Kant's theoretical invention, or productivity of thought, is self -sabotaging, since the advent of the critical project is a productivity of thought which then delimits the engine of thought at large either in dogmatic gestures or non-systematizable empirical wondrousness. The former is celebrated by the fiction of Thomas Ligotti whereas the latter is espoused by the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. /2/ – Weird Fiction and Philosophy. Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Thomas Ligotti Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis H.P. Lovecraft. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up between his own fictions and the universe or nature is reproduced within his fictions in the common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever supernormal. One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of non-material existence. Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to speculative realism as well as contemporary related thinkers have begun to view Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction and an ontological destruction. Thomas Ligotti's weird fiction which he has designated as a kind of “confrontational escapism” might be best described in the following quote from one of his shortstories, “The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity. That there are persons of any kind when all there can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream”. Whereas Lovecraft's weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the awful proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of representation. In an interview, Ligotti states: We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then? This is not to say that Ligotti sees nothing beneath the surface but that there is only darkness or blackness behind it, whether that surface is on the cosmological level or the personal. By addressing the implicit and explicit philosophical issues in Ligotti's work we will see that his nightmarish take on reality is a form of malevolent idealism, an idealism which is grounded in a real, albeit dark and obscure materiality. If Ligotti's horrors ultimately circle around mad perceptions which degrade the subject, it takes aim at the vast majority of the focus of continental philosophy. While Lovecraft's acidic materialism clearly assaults any romantic concept of being from the outside, Ligotti attacks consciousness from the inside: Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror [...] Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness. Clearly, the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Ligotti amount to a anti-anthrocentric onslaught against the ramparts of correlationist continental philosophy. /3/ – Shoggothic Materialism or the Formless Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things? H.P. Lovecraft. “At the Mountains of Madness” On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. Georges Bataille. “Formless”. The Shoggoths feature most prominently in H.P. Lovecraft's shortstory “At the Mountains of Madness” where they are described in the following manner: It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self -luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. The term is a litmus test for materialism itself as the Shoggoth is an amorphous creature. The Shoggoths were living digging machines bio engineered by the Elder Things, and their protoplasmic bodies being formed into various tools by their hypnotic powers. The Shoggoths eventually became self aware and rose up against their masters in an ultimately failed rebellion. After the Elder Ones retreated into the oceans leaving the Shoggoths to roam the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. The onto-genesis of the Shoggoths and their gross materiality, index the horrifyingly deep time of the earth a concept near and dear to Lovecraft's formulation of horror as well as the fear of intelligences far beyond, and far before, the ascent of humankind on earth and elsewhere. The sickly amorphous nature of the Shoggoths invade materialism at large, where while materiality is unmistakably real ie not discursive, psychological, or otherwise overly subjectivist, it questions the relation of materialism to life. As Eugene Thacker writes: The Shoggoths or Elder Things do not even share the same reality with the human beings who encounter them—and yet this encounter takes place, though in a strange no-place that is neither quite that of the phenomenal world of the human subject or the noumenal world of an external reality. Amorphous yet definitively material beings are a constant in Lovecraft's tales. In his tale “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadatth” Lovecraft describes Azathoth as, “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe,” that, “last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blashphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity,” who, “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time”. Azathoth's name may have multiple origins but the most striking is the alchemy term azoth which is both a cohesive agent and a acidic creation pointing back to the generative and the decayed. The indistinction of generation and degradation materially mirrors the blur between the natural and the unnatural as well as life and non-life. Lovecraft speaks of the tension between the natural and the unnatural is his short story “The Unnameable.” He writes, “if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”. Lovecraft explores exactly the tension outlined at the beginning of this chapter, between life and thought. At the end of his short tale Lovecraft compounds the problem as the unnameable is described as “a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory”. Deleuze suggests that becoming-animal is operative throughout Lovecraft's work, where narrators feel themselves reeling at their becoming non-human or of being the anomalous or of becoming atomized. Following Eugene Thacker however, it may be far more accurate to say that Lovecraft's tales exhibit not a becoming-animal but a becoming-creature. Where the monstrous breaks the purportedly fixed laws of nature, the creature is far more ontologically ambiguous. The nameless thing is an altogether different horizon for thought. The creature is either less than animal or more than animal – its becoming is too strange for animal categories and indexes the slow march of thought towards the bizarre. This strangeness is, as aways, some indefinite swirling in the category of immanence and becoming. Bataille begins “The Labyrinth” with the assertion that being, to continue to be, is becoming. More becoming means more being hence the assertion that Bataille's barking dog is more than the sponge. This would mean that the Shoggotth is altogether too much being, too much material in the materialism. Bataille suggests that there is an immanence between the eater and the eaten, across the species and never within them. That is, despite the chaotic storm of immanence there must remain some capacity to distinguish the gradients of becoming without reliance upon, or at least total dependence upon, the powers of intellection to parse the universe into recognizable bits, properly digestible factoids. That is, if we undo Deleuze's aforementioned valorization of sense which, for his variation of materialism, performed the work of the transcendental, but refuse to reinstate Kant's transcendental disjunction between thing and appearance, then it must be a quality of becoming-as-being itself which can account for the discernible nature of things by sense. In an interview with Peter Gratton, Jane Bennett formulates the problem thusly: What is this strange systematicity proper to a world of Becoming? What, for example, initiates this congealing that will undo itself? Is it possible to identify phases within this formativity, plateaus of differentiation? If so, do the phases/plateaus follow a temporal sequence? Or, does the process of formation inside Becoming require us to theorize a non-chronological kind of time? I think that your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question. Philosophy has erred too far on the side of the subject in the subject-object relation and has furthermore, lost the very weirdness of the non-human. Beyond this, the madness of thought need not override. /4/ - Ventriloquial Idealism or the Externality of Thought My aim is the opposite of Lovecraft's. He had an appreciation for natural scenery on earth and wanted to reach beyond the visible in the universe. I have no appreciation for natural scenery and want the objective universe to be a reflection of a character. Thomas Ligotti. “Devotees of Decay and Desolation.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure [….] Horror is more real than we are. Thomas Ligotti. “Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”. Thomas Ligotti's tales are rife with mannequins, puppets, and other brainless entities which of replace the valorized subject of philosophy – that of the free thinking human being. His tales such as “The Dream of the Manikin” aim to destroy the rootedness of consciousness. James Trafford has connected the anti-egoism of Ligotti to Thomas Metzinger – where the self is at best an illusion and we plead desperately for someone else to acknowledge that we are real. Trafford has stated it thus, “Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing and over which they have no control”. An absolute materialism, for Ligotti, implies an alienation of the idea which leads to a ventriloquil idealism. As Ligotti notes in an interview, “the fiasco and nightmare of existence, the particular fiasco and nightmare of human existence, the sense that people are puppets of powers they cannot comprehend, etc.” And then further elaborates that,“[a]ssuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear”. The externality of the idea leads to the unfortunate consequence of consciousness eating at itself through horror which, for Ligotti, is more real than reality and goes beyond horror-as-affect. Beyond this, taking together with the unreality of life and the ventriloquizing of subjectivity, Ligotti's thought becomes an idealism in which thought itself is alien and ultimately horrifying. The role of human thought and the relation of non-relation of horror to thought is not completely clear in Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti argues in his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,that the advent of thought is a mistake of nature and that horror is being in the sense that horror results from knowing too much. Yet, at the same time, Ligotti seems to suggest that thought separates us from nature whereas, for Lovecraft, thought is far less privileged – mind is just another manifestation of the vital principal, it is just another materialization of energy. In his brilliant “Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism” Iain Grant rallies against the negative definition of dogmatism and the transcendental, and suggests that negatively defining both over-focuses on conditions of access and subjectivism at the expense of the real or nature. With Schelling, who is Grant's champion against the subjectivist bastions of both Fichte and Kant, Ligotti's idealism could be taken as a transcendental realism following from an ontological realism. Yet the transcendental status of Ligotti's thought move towards a treatment of the transcendental which may threaten to leave beyond its realist ground. Ligotti states: Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural, as Conrad evidenced in Heart of Darkness, must be admitted if one's inclination is to go to the limits of horror. It is the sense of what should not be- the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the super-natural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. Again, Ligotti equates madness with thought, qualifying both as supernatural while remaining less emphatic about the metaphysical dimensions of horror. The question becomes one of how exactly the hallucinatory realm of the ideal relates to the black churning matter of Lovecraft's chaos of elementary particles. In his tale “I Have a Special Plan for This World” Ligotti formulates thus: A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity. Here Ligotti is not discounting metaphysics but implying that if it does exist the fact that we are phenomenologically ill-equipped to perceive that it is nightmarish. For Ligotti, nightmare and horror occur within the circuit of consciousness whereas for Lovecraft the relation between reality and mind is less productive on the side of mind. It is easier to ascertain how the Kantian philosophy is a defense against the diseases of the head as Kant armors his critical enterprise from too much of the world and too much of the mind. The weird fiction of both Lovecraft and Ligotti demonstrates that there is too much of both feeding into one another in a way that corrodes the Kantian schema throughly, breaking it down into a dead but still ontologically potentiated nigredo. The haunting, terrifying fact of Ligotti's idealism is that the transcendental motion which brought thought to matter, while throughly material and naturalized, brings with it the horror that thought cannot be undone without ending the material that bears it either locally or completely. Thought comes from an elsewhere and an elsewhen being-in-thought. The unthinkable outside thought is as maddening as the unthought engine of thought itself within thought which doesn't exist except for the mind, the rotting décor of the brain. /5/ - Hyperstitional Transcendental Paranoia or Self -Expelled Thought Weird fiction has been given some direct treatment in philosophy in the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land. Nick Land along with others in the 1990s created the Cyber Culture Research Unit as well as the research group Hyperstition. The now defunct hyperstitional website, an outgrowth of the Cyber Culture Research Unit, defined hyperstition in the following fourfold: 1-Element of effective culture that makes itself real. 2-Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device. 3-Coincidence intensifier. 4-Call to the Old Ones. The distinctively Lovecraftian character of hyperstition is hard to miss as is its Deleuzo-Guattarian roots. In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, “We have been criticized for over-quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into”. The indisinction of literature and philosophy mirrors the mess of being and knowing as post-correlationist philosophy, where philosophy tries to make itself real where literature, especially the weird, aims itself at the brain-circuit of horror. The texts of both Lovecraft and Ligotti work through horror as epistemological plasticity meeting with proximity as well as the deep time of Lovecraft and the glacially slow time of paranoia in Ligotti. Against Deleuze, and following Brassier, we cannot allow the time of consciousness, the Bergsonian time of the duree, to override natural time, but instead acknowledge that it is an unfortunate fact of existence as a thinking being. Horror-time, the time of consciousness, with all its punctuated moments and drawn out terrors, cannot compare to the deep time of non-existence both in the unreachable past and the unknown future. The crystalline cogs of Kant's account of experience as the leading light for the possibility of metaphysics must be throughly obliterated. His gloss of experience in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics could not be more sterile: Experience consists of intuitions, which belong to the sensibility, and of judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding. But the judgments which the understanding makes entirely out of sensuous intuitions are far from being judgments of experience. For in the one case the judgment connects only the perceptions as they are given in sensuous intuition [....] Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances in consciousness, so far as this connection is necessary. Here it is difficult to dismiss the queasiness that Kant's legalism induces upon sight for both Badiou and David-Menard. Kant's thought becomes, as Foucault says when reflecting on Sade's text in relation to nature, “the savage abolition of itself”. For Badiou, Kant's philosophy simply closes off too much of the outside, freezing the world of thought in an all too limited formalism. Critical philosophy is simply the systematized quarantine on future thinking, on thinking which would threaten the formalism which artificially grants thought its own coherency in the face of madness. Even the becoming-mad of Deleuze, while escaping the rumbling ground, makes grounds for itself, mad grounds but grounds which are thinkable in their affect. The field of effects allows for Deleuze's aesthetic and radical empiricism, in which effects and/or occasions make up the material of the world to be thought as a chaosmosis of simulacra. Given a critique of an empiricism of aesthetics, of the image, it may be difficult to justify an attack on Kantian formalism with the madness of literature, which does not aim to make itself real but which we may attempt to make real. That is, how do Lovecraft's and Ligotti's materials, as materials for philosophy to work on, differ from either the operative formalisms of Kant or the implicitly formalized images of Deleuzian empiricism? It is simply that such texts do not aim to make themselves real, and make claims to the real which are more alien to us than familiar, which is why their horror is immediately more trustworthy. This is the madness which Blanchot discusses in The Infinite Conversation through Cervantes and his knight – the madness of book-life, of the perverse unity of literature and life a discussion which culminates in the discussion of one of the weird's masters, that of Kafka. The text is the knowing of madness, since madness, in its moment of becoming-more-mad, cannot be frozen in place but by the solidifications of externalizing production. This is why Foucault ends his famous study with works of art. Furthermore extilligence, the ability to export the products of our maligned brains, is the companion of the attempts to export, or discover the possibility of intelligences outside of our heads, in order for philosophy to survive the solar catastrophe. To borrow again from Deleuze, writing is inseparable from becoming. The mistake is to believe that madness is reabsorbed by extilligence, by great works, or that it could be exorcised by the expelling of thought into the inorganic or differently organic. Going out of our heads does not guarantee we will no longer mean we cannot still go out of our minds. This is simply because of the outside, of matter, or force, or energy, or thing-in-itself, or Schopenhauerian Will. In Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn” an “impoverished student of metaphysics” becomes intrigued by strange viol music coming from above his room. After meeting the musician the student discovers that each night he plays frantic music at a window in order to keep some horridness at bay, some “impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium”. The aesthetic defenses provided by the well trained brain can bear the hex of matter for so long, the specter of unalterability within it which too many minds obliterate, collapsing everything before the thought of thought as thinkable or at least noetically mutable on our own terms. Transcendental paranoia is the concurrent nightmare and promise of Paul Humphrey's work, of being literally out of our minds. It is the gothic counterpart of thinking non-conceptually but also of thinking never belonging to any instance of purportedly solid being. As Bataille stated, “At the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes there is no longer any room for him” Thought is immaterial only to the degree that it is inhuman, it is a power that tries, always with failure, to ascertain its own genesis. Philosophy, if it can truly return to the great outdoors, if it can leave behind the dead loop of the human skull, must recognize not only the non-priority of human thought, but that thought never belongs to the brain that thinks it, thought comes from somewhere else. To return to the train image from the beginning “a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis” this is the problem of thought, and of thinking thought, of being no longer able to isolate thought, with only a thought-formed structure. [1] One of the central tenets of Francois Laruelle's non-philosophy is that philosophy has traditionally operated on material already presupposed as thinkable instead of trying to think the real in itself. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, remains fixated on transcendental synthesis which shatters immanence into an empirical datum and an a prori factum which are then fused by a third thing such as the ego. For a critical account of Laruelle's non-philosophy see Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Teaching the Trinity:Scripture and Performance of the Psychological Analogy in Aquinas's Summa TheologiaeZane E. ChuTeaching the Trinity, for St. Thomas Aquinas, takes its point of departure from Sacred Scripture. He makes this explicit at the outset of the Trinitarian treatise in the Summa theologiae, citing Christ's words at John 8:42, "from God I proceeded," and affirming, "divine Scripture in the things of divinity, uses words that pertain to (...) procession."1 The order of teaching then continues through speculative effort to give an account of the scriptural witness to the distinction of persons in God, in order to return to the same Scripture with a deeper grasp of its meaning.2Aquinas is a master of the sacred page, and his basic pedagogy for theology involves the "exercises of Sacred Scripture" of reading, disputing, and preaching.3 Recent scholarship draws attention to his reading of Scripture [End Page 1149] expressed in biblical commentaries as foundational for his teaching and as an interpretive context for his summative works.4 My purpose is to illustrate this basic pedagogy in the Trinitarian treatise of the Summa theologiae, taking the Lectura super Ioannem as an interpretive context for the analogies of word and love—the psychological analogy—for the Trinity. Most scholarly discussion of the psychological analogy elaborates on its theoretical aspects, with some attention to its scriptural foundation.5 I wish to show the priority of Scripture in Aquinas's employment of this analogy in three respects, namely, its foundation in exegesis, performative aspects, and orientation toward preaching.My investigation focuses on question 27 of the prima pars alongside pertinent sections of the Super Ioannem. I argue that citations from the Gospel of John (8:42, 15:26, and 14:16) in the sed contras of articles 1 and 3 function to ground the psychological analogy in scriptural exegesis and to prompt its performance. Turning to the corresponding commentary shows Aquinas leading the student to knowledge of Christ as divine Word and to love of him from the Holy Spirit that both leads to and follows upon such knowledge. This provokes an affective experience of loving Christ in knowing his divinity that is an actual performance of the psychological analogy. The magisterial responses then use this affective experience as a basis to facilitate a grasp of the analogy, the articulation of which is a further guided performance that reflects on this experience. Aquinas teaches the Trinity by exercising the student both affectively and intellectually in its scriptural foundation for a deeper grasp that prepares for preaching. I develop my argument in three [End Page 1150] main steps. First, I specify the place of Scripture in Aquinas's teaching and review the composition of the Trinitarian treatise. Then, I examine the first four articles of question 27 and corresponding sections of the Super Ioannem, in the order of the analogies of word and of love. Lastly, I consider Aquinas's treatment of the Holy Spirit's proper name of Love and subsequent preaching to illustrate Scripture as a point of arrival through performance of the psychological analogy.The Place of Scripture in Aquinas's TeachingFor Aquinas, Scripture is placed within his broader practice of sacra doctrina or holy teaching, attention to which assists in demonstrating how the Johannine citations ground the psychological analogy in Scripture and prompt its performance. Sacra doctrina has a primarily pastoral orientation, namely, to form Dominicans for preaching and hearing confessions.6 Though more speculative than practical, sacra doctrina as speculation or contemplation of the truth of Christian faith contained in Scripture is to be handed on to others.7 This requires training in the scriptural exercises of reading and disputing as preparation for preaching. These may be taken as "spiritual exercises" that engage not only thought, but also affectivity in service of personal transformation for the preacher's way of life.8 Aquinas's practice of sacra doctrina begins with reading Scripture as expressed in biblical commentaries, and develops in the Summa theologiae, which accesses Scripture through citations to offer a summative grasp of the truth contained therein. Here, I review the formal aspects of Aquinas's teaching from Scripture in these texts... (shrink)

“Give to everyone who begs from you,” Jesus advised his followers. Most of us do not and rush on by, concerned for our safety, for what the beggar will buy with our gift of alms, for who will benefit from our gift. Fewer stop and give something: if not cash, then a snack or beverage, and their precious time. A century since Marcel Mauss published his famous essay, we all feel quite well informed about “the gift.” In this richly (...) detailed study, Caner's achievement is to show how different gift-giving was in the late antique Roman Empire, “the first truly affluent, complex Christian society.” Philanthropy was no longer the ancient “love of humanity,” the imperative to be generous to people, when you thought, or even knew, that they did not deserve it. Yet philanthropy was moreover not, or not only, a series of precisely calibrated acts of reciprocal giving.Caner's focus is on the religious gift. He identifies five distinct categories of religious gift-giving, which others have too easily conflated. The newest of these was the blessing (eulogia), which emerged only in the sixth century, in the thousands of sermons, saintly lives, and letters that Caner consulted. It has been identified similarly in other ascetic cultures, for example in Hinduism and Jainism, as the pure or free gift whose existence Mauss denied. The blessing is a gift of divine benevolence, grace delivered through a human mediator. It is not synonymous with the gift of alms (eleēmosynē), a very human act of mercy from one individual to another. These are in turn distinct from charity (agapē), “self-sacrificial gifts derived from essential resources”; two forms of offering—liturgical offerings (prosphorai), such as the communion bread, on the one hand, and fruit-bearing offerings (karpophoriai), along with agricultural and other gifts to support religious professionals. “Each category,” which has an equivalent in contemporary Syriac and Coptic writings, “was associated with a distinct set of goals, responsibilities, relationships, and material resources.”The late antique city was as busy with organized gangs of professional beggars as any modern downtown, but early Christians could not simply turn away. They were hectored into caring by golden-mouthed preachers like John, bishop of New Rome. Chrysostom insisted that almsgiving should be direct and personal, a source of discomfort for those who offered comfort. The rich might also, as ever, engage in ostentatious acts of giving, the exchange of worldly goods to redeem them from their sins, including the pride associated with ostentatious giving. Transactional gift-giving could end up with everyone insulted: generosity could be refused, donors repudiated, gifts returned. That much seems familiar at a time when museums and universities have felt compelled to remove the names of disgraced donors from their buildings and galleries. Caner's rich analysis, because it is so firmly rooted in early Byzantium, offers reasons, and some new tools, to think again and hard about the complexities of philanthropy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:560 BOOK REVIEWS recent discussion of Christian political theology in On War and Morality is correct, 1) Augustine was more Eusebian than we have generally thought, and 2) Luther was possibly his best exegete. Regarding Forrester's remaining political option, his leapfrogging from Tertullian to the Anabaptists misses the political theology of Western monasticism, which produced not only the witnessing cloister but also a brand of church-state theory (e.g. Gregory (...) VII and Leo IX) quite unlike East· ern Eusebianism. In short, Forrester's spectrum obscures more than it clarifies; the range of qualitatively distinct Christian political theologies is simply wider than he suggests. And while one appreciates a clear discussion of liberation theology, new paths to understanding are not opened. Loyola University Chicago, Illinois MICHAEL J. SCHUCK The Grammar of the Heart: New Essays in Moral Philosophy and Theology. Edited by RICHARD H. BELL. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988. Pg. 259 +xxviii. $24.95. Grammar tells us what kind of a thing something is, and this set of essays addresses what Paul Holmer calls the " grammar of faith." This grammar has been traditionally seen, however, in two markedly different ways: as one essay puts the contrast, a grammar of ' rational belief ' as opposed to a "grammar appropriate to affairs of the heart" (Hust· wit, 97). It is the second of these, the character of the grammar of the 'heart,' which these essays as a whole explore, and the sub-title of the 1987 symposium in honor of Holmer from which they are drawn- " Thinking with Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein "-indicates the two main avenues of exploration. Through these, we are told in the introduction, the authors intend to shift the concern of philosophy of religion and theology from questions of " epistemic credentials " to a construe· tive re-valuation of our age-an age which, arguably at least, is still as much " an age without culture " as it was when Wittgenstein first made the complaint. The hook consists of two parts, and each part is introduced by an illustrative selection from Holmer's writings on faith and morality, then followed by a corresponding set of six original essays. The first set of essays, the editor tells us, are " more philosophical," analyzing "the grammar of our modern culture and of religious practices in general," BOOK REVIEWS 561 while the second six are devoted to analyses of specifically moral and Christian concepts. Although the separation of the two may initially seem an artificial one, precisely against the " spirit of both Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard" which the essays are said to exemplify, it does in fact often result in the kind of overlap and repetition which are quite fruitful-for example, as in the mutually illuminating correspondence between the constructive philosophical suggestions about metaphor in the first part (Whittaker) and the presentation of the specifically Kierkegaardian understanding of the metaphorical ' language of love ' in the second part (Walsh). The collection as a whole is indeed in the spirit of Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard by virtue of its imaginative diversity of perspective. Although there is the predictable (and admittedly useful) exploration of the ' grammar of the heart ' in terms of the standardly Kierkegaardian categories of " risk, passion, paradox, and duty " (95), there are also proposals which are both unexpected and exciting. A glance at a few of these will reveal something of the particular character and value of this collection. The centerpiece of the first part is the explicit proposal in two of the essays of an understanding of the grammar of the 'heart ' in which the role and relevance of the private (personal, individualistic) is challenged and rethought in light of the public (social interaction and practice ). The ' heart ' at issue is found at the heart of community; the grammar of the ' heart ' is a grammar of the activities of a life in common, rather than of privatized inwardness or interiority. Glehe-Mcf>ller, for example, examines the relation between two views of religion in Wittgenstein's writings-a first-person (Kierkegaardian) type of religion and a sociological view of religion as a shared phenomenon-arguing that, in the end, despite an explicit adherence to the former throughout his writings, Wittgenstein's intellectual commitments... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 21.1 (2001) 157-161 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism. By Jacques Dupuis, S.J. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books. 1997. xiv + 433 pp. There may not be another individual more qualified than Jacques Dupuis to write this book. He has not only spent a lifetime teaching and serving in a part of the (...) world where the encounter between Christianity and other faiths has been particularly pressing (India), but he has also previously reflected intensively and published widely on this topic. Even more impressive, however, is the fact that the scholarship that emerges in this volume reflects Dupuis as a faithful Catholic Christian, both in the sense of paying sincere heed to the wide range of the Roman Church's official teachings on this and related topics (he taught for years at the Gregorian University in Rome and edited, with Josef Neuner, the massive The Christian Faith in the Doctrinal Documents of the Catholic Church 1 ) and in the sense of thinking along with others in the universal community of faithful Christians. Here we have a master theologian practicing his craft, working within a community of theological inquirers, bringing out, displaying, and putting to work old things and new in the effort to understand one of the most crucial issues of our time.The result is a comprehensive and lucid discussion of Christian theology of religions that is indispensable as an introduction to students without any knowledge of the landscape even while it also serves as a handy status questionis to those already [End Page 157] familiar with the terrain. The first half of the book (part 1) is an overview of the history of Christian approaches to other faiths, beginning with the biblical material, continuing through the Logos spermatikos theology of the early Fathers, the developments surrounding the Extra ecclesiam nulla salus ("no salvation outside the Church") axiom over the centuries, and the pre- and post-Vatican II attempts to develop a theology of religions in the Catholic Church. This part concludes by summarizing the paradigm shifts from ecclesiocentrism to (in order) christocentrism, theocentrism, and regnocentrism/soteriocentrism. Throughout the discussion--especially of the pre-twentieth-century history that focused much more so on the fate of the unevangelized--Dupuis manages to provide important connections to developments in Christian thinking about the role of the religions in the divine scheme of things.The second half of the volume (part 2) presents seven of the most difficult theological questions in Christian theologia religionum today. First, concerning the covenant: is there only one, or are there many? Is salvation history particular, or universal? Dupuis' provisional response is that there is one cosmic covenant that is never revoked. This covenant is revealed according to what he calls a "trinitarian rhythm" whereby God covenants through his Word, in his Spirit, and this covenant includes the witnesses of God left in other religions as well. Second, concerning revelation: does revelation come to us from "without," or emerge from "within" ourselves? What about the sacred texts of other traditions? How are Christians to understand the fullness of the revelation in Jesus Christ vis-à-vis other faiths? Dupuis' answer is that divine revelation is indeed scattered among the various religions, even if fully captured only in Christ, and that these revelations are thereby differentiated but complementary. 2 Third, concerning the divine mystery: is the "Real" beyond the categories of "personal" and "impersonal"? Is God one, or many (triune)? Dupuis responds that the religions have complementary and converging insights into the divine reality. Fourth, concerning Jesus Christ: is he one among many savior figures? What does the uniqueness of Christ mean? Is there a distinction or an absolute identity between Jesus and Christ? Is the Christ particular, or universal? Dupuis posits a "searching christology" whereby God reveals Godself in and through the images and symbols of the religions and through which humankind therefore responds to the divine graciousness. Jesus' uniqueness is thereby both "constitutive" (of universal significance) and "relational" (inserted in the overall plan of... (shrink)

Tragedy plays a central role in Hegel's early writings on theology and politics. Hegel’s overarching aim in these texts is to determine the kind of mythology that would best complement religious and political freedom in modernity. Peter Wake claims that, for Hegel at this early stage, ancient Greek tragedy provided the model for such a mythology and suggested a way to oppose the rigid hierarchies and authoritarianism that characterized Europe of his day. Wake follows Hegel as he (...) develops his idea of the essence of Christianity and its relation to the distinctly tragic expression of beauty found in Greek mythology. (shrink)

Dede Korkut Stories are a national cultural heritage that narrates about events and challenges of Oghuz Turks in 10th-11th centuries. This period of time is important, as it was the times when Turks became Muslims. In this work, heroism, customs, habits and traditions, socio-cultural and moral life of the Turks before and after becoming Muslims are analysed. One of the topics addressed in this work is religious beliefs and worships of the Turks after became Muslims. In this context, the belief (...) in Allah appears to be the most emphasized type of belief in the stories. The theme of fate, which is included in the subjects of Tawḥīd (oneness of Allāh) is another theme mentioned in the stories. The stories also includes some expressions regarding particularly the Prophet Muḥammad as well as some other prophets. Jibrīl and ʿAzrāʾīl angels are also mentioned. As for the Divine Books, only the Qur’ān is namely addressed and other divine books are not mentioned. The beliefs regarding afterlife, such as death, resurrection, heaven, hell, pool of al-Kawthar (abundance) are also referred to in the stories. The Book of Dede Korkut is not a didactic work written to teach Islam. On the contrary, in the stories, Islam is discussed as an element of the spirit/essence of individual and society. The aim of this study is to investigate the representations of the beliefs of tawḥīd, prophecy and hereafter of the Turks, especially the Oghuz Turks with reference to narrations in Dede Korkut stories. It aims to discuss them in the context of six pillars of faith and evaluate from the Islamic belief point of view.Summary: The Book of Dede Korkut consists of twelve epic stories created within the oral tradition of Turkish Folk Literature. It is said that the origins of these stories, which are one of the oldest works of Turkish Folk Literature, went as far as 7th century. It is generally accepted that the Book of Dede Korkut, which narrates about Oghuz Turks who lived in 10th-11th centuries was transferred to writing after 15th century. There is no information found about writer/s of the Book. Dede Korkut, who considered being the narrator of the stories, is in fact a character in the stories. Dede Korkut plays qobuz, reads poetry, names children, mediates in marital affairs, resolves disputes, and leads religious rituals in the stories. Therefore, he stands out as a saint figure and considered to be wise man of the Oghuz Turks in almost every story, especially regarding social events. In this work, there are many expressions about heroism, customs, habits and traditions, socio-cultural and moral experiences of the Turks before and after becoming Muslims. The stories bear many traces from the earlier Turkish beliefs. However, these are not the issues of this study. The dates of the emergence of the stories, 10th and 11th centuries, coincides with the times when the Turks became Muslim. This situation makes the stories more important as they include rich narratives about the fundamental beliefs of Islam. Especially the belief in Allāh, which is one of the six pillars of faith, appears to be the most emphasized in the stories. In these stories, Turkish and Persian names of Allāh as well as His Arabic names and attributes are mentioned directly or indirectly.The belief in predestination and casualty related with Allāh's eternal knowledge and determination is another faith object that takes place in the stories. The issues regarding the predestination discussed in the stories as follows: the deeds occur with the wish of Allāh; Allāh decides whether the child male or female; Allāh predestines human lifetime, livelihood, time of death and calamities.There are also narrations about the belief in the prophets in the stories. Particularly the Prophet Muhammad's prophecy is prioritised. Adam, Noah, Abraham, and Moses are the other prophets mentioned in the stories. The successive authority of Adam and His story with Iblīs; the wife and donkey of Noah, not burning of Abraham when he was thrown into the fire, the speaking of Allāh with Moses and the staff of Moses are some of the expressions related with prophecy in the stories. Nimrod against Abraham and Pharaoh against Moses are described as negative personalities in the stories. In the stories, the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) is handled in a position that intercession is demanded from Him. Greetings and prayers are read for Him. His intercession is sought for forgiveness of sins and acceptance of prayers. He is exalted with some attributions, such as the holly Prophet Peace be upon Him, friend of Allāh, the leader of religion and the headman of religion. When the Prophet Muhammad is mentioned, it is felt that there is a high respect and an enthusiastic love. When he is addressed, the expressions indicating respect and affection, such as "His name is magnificent Muhammad" and "His name is magnificent Muhammad Mustafa" are used in the stories.In the stories, only the Qur’ān is mentioned among the divine books, none of the Torah, the Zabūr and the Injīl is mentioned. It is referred that the Qur’ān descended from the heavens and it is the word of Allāh and His knowledge, and it was copied (collected) by Uthman. It is described as "Magnificent Qur’ān".It is seen in the stories that there is also a place for the belief in angels and only two of the four great angels are mentioned. One of them is ʿAzrāʾīl, the death angel. It is one of the main heroes in the story of Deli Dumrul. ʿAzrāʾīl is described as an angel from the sky, who has red-winged, who takes the souls of living beings by the command of Allāh and kill them. It is also narrated that ʿAzrāʾīl takes the form of human and pigeon, and the struggle of ʿAzrāʾīl with Deli Dumrul. The other great angel mentioned in the stories is Jibrīl. In the story of Emre, the Son of Begil, it is described as an angel fulfilling the commandments of Allāh. Apart from these, there is no information about other angels and their characteristics, such as not being gendered, not to sin, and being created from light. Within the scope of invisible beings, the Devil is also narrated in the stories as it did not prostrate itself to Adam, and therefore it was repelled and cursed.The principle of the belief in Hereafter, which is one of the pillars of faith, is also dealt with in the stories. The ending, death, resurrection, reckoning, Heaven, Hell, seeing Allāh's face in Heaven, drinking water from the pool of al-Kawthar are some of the topics addressed in relation to this principle. While talking about Heaven in the stories, the words "Uçmak" (flight) in Turkish and "Behesht" (paradise) in Persian are mentioned in addition to Arabic "Jannah" (heaven).The Book of Dede Korkut is not a religious book written to teach the ʿaqāʾid (beliefs) of Islam or its practices. On the contrary, it is a work that narrates about people’s lives and social experiences. There is neither any specific verse from the Qur’ān nor sayings or the deeds of the Prophet (ḥadīth) included in the stories. However, the contents of many issues stated in the Qur’ān and ḥadīth are expressed in the stories. For instance, the statements from the surah (chapter) al-Ikhlāṣ (sincerity), such as al-Aḥad (the one), Allāh begets not, nor was He begotten, and not being any equivalent to Him are mentioned in the stories. Likewise, not burning of the Prophet Abraham when thrown into the fire, speaking of Allāh with Moses and giving the stuff to him as a miracle are also stated in the Qur’ān. As for the pool of al-Kawthar, the believers’ seeing Allāh in Heaven, ineffectiveness of the deeds without saying in the name of Allah are mentioned in ḥadīths. However, some information that is not rooted in the Qur’ān and ḥadīths, such as the stinging of Nimrod's arrow is also encountered in the stories. Based on the narrations in the stories, it seems possible to draw the conclusion that the Oghuz Turks mentioned in the Book of Dede Korkut adopted Ahl al-Sunnah (people of Sunnah) interpretation of Islam. However, it should be reminded that this implication will lose its meaning if it is proved that the original versions of the stories were redesigned according to the interpretation of Ahl al-Sunnah in the process of transferring them into writing. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Spirit of Settler Colonialism and the City Streets:A Response to Mishuana GoemanErin C. Tarveri want thank dr. goeman for her excellent paper and for introducing us to these extraordinary artists. Their work is beautiful and important, and I am grateful for the opportunity to witness it and think about it and to consider in particular in its relation to its setting in Los Angeles.In what follows, I (...) want to consider that setting—a city, as Dr. Goeman notes, containing some of "the most expensive real estate properties in the United States," commercial areas officially defined by "colonial encompassing property logics," and marked by "noise and [the] reverberation of mass consumerism" ("Caring for Landscapes 57). My interest will be in putting Dr. Goeman's analysis of these works and the Indigenous artist-activists who create them in dialogue with Jane Addams's diagnosis of the problems of early twentieth-century American urban life in her book The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets. I will suggest that Dr. Goeman's paper illuminates the limitations of Addams's approach to responding to the alienation of modern urban life—which, while rightly critical of the harms of mass consumer culture and the reduction of city life to economic productivity in conditions of industrialization, does not grapple with its own implication in settler colonialism and dispossession, and therefore cannot care for the land or its inhabitants as these artists invite us to do. I will also invite her to reflect on whether Addams's suggestion that play and recreation are essential components of urban human flourishing is borne out in the work of these artists.Jane Addams, in 1909, discussed the problems of urban life in post-Industrial Revolution Chicago in similar terms to those Dr. Goeman uses to describe the contemporary landscape of Los Angeles. The contemporary city, Addams writes, in forgoing spaces for public play, art, creativity, and non-production, has "entered upon a most difficult and dangerous experiment … at the very moment when the city has become distinctly industrial, [End Page 71] and daily labor is continually more monotonous and subdivided" (4–5). In this context, young people are increasingly alienated and isolated, valued solely for the products of their labor, and desperate for social connection. The playfulness and creativity of youth cannot be entirely stifled, yet without clear public spaces or institutions for outlets, young people become easy targets for capitalists who promise pleasure and self-actualization through consumption—of liquor, of fashion, of music, and so on. Lamenting the impoverished state that the city of mass consumption leaves us in, Addams writes:The spontaneous joy, the clamor for pleasure, the desire of the young people to appear finer and better and altogether more lovely than they really are, the idealization not only of each other but of the whole earth which they regard but as a theater for their noble exploits, the unworldly ambitions, the romantic hopes, the make-believe world in which they live, if properly utilized, what might they not do to make our sordid cities more beautiful, more companionable? And yet at the present moment every city is full of young people who are utterly bewildered and uninstructed in regard to the basic experience which must inevitably come to them, and which has varied, remote and indirect expressions.(15–16)There is, for Addams, a basic human need for play, creativity, and connection—to a community and to the natural world itself—whose unsatisfaction in a city devoted entirely to industry is nothing short of dehumanizing. So basic are these needs that they cry out for fulfillment in the most unexpected moments. She quotes a young man who describes his experience thusly:I never had a chance to go into the country when I was a kid, but I remember one day when I had to deliver a package way out on the west side, that I saw a flock of sheep in Douglas Park. I had never thought that a sheep could be anywhere but in a picture, and when I saw those big white spots on the green grass beginning to move and to turn into sheep, I... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.4 (2001) 597-600 [Access article in PDF] Andrew Haas. Hegel and the Problem of Multiplicity. SPEP Studies in Historical Philosophy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000. Pp. xxxii + 355. Paper, $29.95. Jon Stewart. The Unity of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: A Systematic Interpretation. SPEP Studies in Historical Philosophy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000. Pp. xv + 556. Cloth, $69.95. In his (...) study, The Unity of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: A Systematic Interpretation, Jon Stewart not only analyzes Hegel's Phenomenology in chapter-by-chapter fashion but he also provides a compelling argument as to why even individual sections of the book can only be interpreted in the context of the unity of the work as a whole. [End Page 597]Stewart views the Phenomenology as a continuation of Kant's project in the first Critique, claiming that Kant did not go far enough in uncovering and justifying the necessary conditions of understanding. Thus, Stewart sees the Phenomenology as a transcendental argument. Like Kant, Hegel is concerned with truth and objectivity but in each subsequent chapter of the Phenomenology, according to Stewart, Hegel takes the reader through a different determination of objectivity.Perhaps most important is Stewart's view of Hegel's notion of "Absolute Knowing," the last section of the Phenomenology. Eschewing theological or metaphysical interpretations or interpretations according to which history comes to an end or some type of divine knowledge is attained, Stewart impressively argues that, for Hegel, absolute knowing means that self-consciousness has finally arrived at the point at which all of the conditions for cognition have been unpacked and that self-consciousness sees these conditions in their necessary systematic and developmental unity. As such, "Absolute Knowing" is merely backward looking; self-consciousness comes to realize all of the forms that knowledge has taken in the past and how this past relates to the way in which self-consciousness cognizes at present. Thus, the Phenomenology, on Stewart's view, is a ladder from common sense to science; it completes a deduction of the categories of thought—universality, particularity, and individuality—that are present in all forms of human thinking in all time periods.At the beginning of this work, Stewart summarizes Hegel's life and works, as well as discusses the Kantian background of Hegel's project as a whole. The subsequent chapters of his book parallel the major divisions in the Phenomenology. Each chapter and each of the various subsections within the chapters—again always paralleling Hegel's work—begins with a brief overview of what Stewart sees as the goal toward which Hegel is progressing in the particular section of the Phenomenology. He then provides an account of the "Notion" or paradigm of truth that Hegel presently criticizes. Accordingly, the author addresses the dialectic by which the particular Notion is sublated or overcome. It is in this section that Stewart explicitly sets out whenever possible the In-Itself, the For-Itself, and the In-Itself-For-Itself moments of the dialectic. Stewart always makes an explicit attempt at discussing what is at issue in the dialectical moment, say, either an irreconcilable split between immediacy and mediacy or between universal and particular. Finally, he ends each chapter or subsequent section with a review of what Hegel has done and how this, then, leads into the next section of the work.In the course of this study, Stewart admirably argues for why the Phenomenology should not be regarded as a "patchwork," by convincingly demonstrating the intricate unity of Hegel's Phenomenology. He shows how Hegel always returns to a similar structure—using, in fact, the very same categories—even in some of the parts of the book that scholars or certain schools of interpretation have tended to dismiss. In the chapter of his book that addresses the first formal chapter of the Phenomenology, "Consciousness," Stewart argues that each of the three subdivisions in the chapter focuses on, respectively, 1) being, 2) the one and the many, and... (shrink)

The fundamental aim of this study will be to offer a precise account of the meaning of Hegel's concept of recognition as it is found in the early Jena-Schriften and the Phenomenology of Spirit . However, in locating the origins of the concept in Greek tragedy, we will also be led beyond the meaning of the concept to its significance. Its significance is established most clearly insofar as the concept can be used to form the basis (...) of an overall interpretation of the PhG as resembling a tragedy. The contemporary influence and relevance of the concept is presented in the Introduction. ;Part I traces the emergence of the concept of recognition out of the concept of love in the Frankfurt-Schriften; it then treats the subsequent development of the concept in the early systematic efforts of the Jena era. Part II focuses upon the distinctive and detailed treatment of the concept as it is portrayed in the PhG. Part III locates the origins of Hegel's concept in Greek tragedy, i.e., tragic recognition, and moves on to consider recognition within the structure of the wholes in the PhG and Greek tragedy. ;The concept of recognition has been seen as Hegel's attempt to come to terms with the individual's lack of integration in modern society. It is employed as a critique of social contract theory in the sense that recognition demands more from individuals in a society than the "merely external bonding" of a contract. The self-knowledge sense of recognition, as opposed to the social and interpersonal senses, has not been given sufficient attention. This can be explained somewhat by the fact that this sense is not featured in the early Jena-Schriften. The relation between knowledge and recognition becomes a pressing issue in the PhG. The self-knowledge sense does not supplant the other senses; rather, it supplements them and thus enriches the concept. The self-knowledge sense of recognition, and even the relation between the different senses is best explicated by reference to tragic recognition. (shrink)

This essay introduces this special issue on virtue ethics in relation to military AI. It describes the current situation of military AI ethics as following that of AI ethics in general, caught between consequentialism and deontology. Virtue ethics serves as an alternative that can address some of the weaknesses of these dominant forms of ethics. The essay describes how the articles in the issue exemplify the value of virtue-related approaches for these questions, before ending with thoughts for further research.

Tereza Matějčková’s book presents a highly interesting phenomenological reading of Hegel’s early masterpiece. The result is a proposal to take the title seriously – such that we can see the book as the earliest introduction into the methods and topics of philosophical phenomenology, despite the fact that Husserl himself, in contrast to Heidegger, did not seem to see the narrow relation. I especially value Tereza Matějčkováʼs very deep understanding of the dialectical humour and irony of Hegel’s writings. However, I (...) understand the Phenomenology of Spirit in a somehow more radical way as a most general ‘logicֹ’ of self-consciousness. It shows how referring to myself is referring to the world and vice versa, despite the fact that the word ‘world’ does not play a prominent role in Hegelʼs text. Some disagreements result over Hegelʼs wide use of metaphors and analogies in his structural analysis of personal self-relations, for example in his reconstruction and critique of the age-old (in fact Platonic) image of a fight between a thinking soul as master and a system of immediate bodily desires as slave. We cannot get rid of inclinations and appetites, and we cannot retreat, as the Stoics had thought, into pure thinking. In other words, there is no fight ‘for recognition’ between different individuals in Hegelʼs book, but in the end an answer to a classical theodicy saying that the world, as it is, is the best one we have because there is only one world. (shrink)

Hegel came to maturity as a philosopher during the first years of the nineteenth century, developing through prodigious intellectual struggles a highly original conception of dialectic as a method for rationally comprehending traumatic historical change. At the same time, he continued a process begun earlier, of critical engagement with the Christian gospel and its historical ethos. Hegel spent much of his youth reacting against this drama and its cultural expression. By the time he published his early masterpiece, the _Phenomenology (...) of Spirit_, he had found an ingenious way of reconstructing it in counterpoint with his new dialectical understanding of historical experience. _Dialectic and Gospel in the Development of Hegel's Thinking_ tells the story of this interplay as it develops in Hegel's thinking. It culminates in a fresh interpretation of the _Phenomenology of Spirit_ and a detailed commentary on larger portions of the text relevant to that story. Crites's reading of the masterpiece is contextualized by three substantial chapters detailing the course of Hegel's reflections on Christian themes through the first thirty-five years of his life. These chapters are both biographical and textual, treating not only the philosopher’s personal and intellectual development but also the major cultural influences that informed it. Hegel is seen to have begun as a child of the Enlightenment powerfully, affected by the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment, who finds his way to his own position as a founding genius of German Idealism and its historical dialectic. His development is thus interpreted as an epitome of a major transformation in European intellectual history. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Apocalypse of Wisdom: Louis Bouyer's Theological Recovery of the Cosmos by Keith LemnaAaron WilliamsThe Apocalypse of Wisdom: Louis Bouyer's Theological Recovery of the Cosmos by Keith Lemna (Brooklyn, NY: Angelico, 2019), xxx + 488 pp.Keith Lemna has done the theological world a great service. In The Apocalypse of Wisdom: Louis Bouyer's Theological Recovery of the Cosmos, he offers the English-speaking world for the (...) first time a monograph on the thought of the Oratorian Louis Bouyer. Bouyer is undoubtedly one of the theological giants of the twentieth century. Born in Paris in 1913, he was ordained a Lutheran pastor in 1936. After only three years as a Lutheran clergyman, he was received into the Catholic Church at the Benedictine Abbey of Saint Wandrille. Then ordained as an Oratorian priest in 1944, he taught from 1946 to 1962 at the Institut Catholique de Paris and abroad for the three decades following.1 He is most well-known for his work on the liturgy both before and after the Second Vatican Council. With fifty books to his name, including a nine-part synthesis on Christian doctrine, the breadth of his theological vision and work is astounding. In France he is considered one of the four preeminent theologians of the post-World War II era, and his theological contemporaries in Europe, such as Hans Urs von Balthasar and Joseph Ratzinger / Benedict XVI, always held the Oratorian in high regard.2 Yet, in the English-speaking world, much of his work has gone without comment.3 Thankfully, into the void steps this excellent work by Lemna. [End Page 1353]Anyone familiar with the Bouyerian corpus knows the challenge of approaching it. With its vast array of subject matter, ranging from biblical to liturgical to historical to spiritual to speculative theology, one wonders whether there is any one thread woven throughout the varied strands, a single theme around which the whole sprawling corpus can be understood. In fact, there is, and Lemna has deftly identified it. For Bouyer, the fundamental question of theology is the world's relation to God.4 The structure of the first six books of his nine-part treatise on systematic theology attest to the priority of the question with the first three works addressing the question of the world, or the economy of creation and salvation, and the latter three works addressing the question of God, or theology properly speaking: the doctrine of the Trinitarian God. Interestingly, though Bouyer's work on theological cosmology, Cosmos, is the third book in the series, it was, in fact, the last of the six to be written. In this sense, as Lemna points out, "Cosmos is a capstone monograph... summarizing in important ways the decisive first six volumes" (xiv). Theological cosmology fully illuminates the God–world relation as Bouyer sees it, and since this relation sits at the heart of his thought, Cosmos is for Bouyer both his "most personal, as well as most speculative work" and indeed, "opens up the meaning of his other writings" beyond the dogmatic sphere (25). One could, then, scarcely choose a better entry point into the wide theological world of this "mind with a very special character," as Joseph Ratzinger saw him.5The Apocalypse of Wisdom is an expansive commentary on Bouyer's cosmology at the heart of which is a liturgical, even nuptial, vision of the whole of creation known and loved in the mind of God from all eternity, as the uncreated Wisdom of God. In creation God freely gives existence to the world ex nihilo, so that it might return to him in a liturgical song of praise and thanksgiving, as the Bride of his eternal Son, the eschatological and cosmic Church, created wisdom now made glorious and radiant through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. As Lemna puts it, "Bouyer shows that cosmology should be a pursuit of wisdom, but that Wisdom is ultimately a gift revealed or uncovered by means of apokalypsis in the re-creative interventions of the divine Word and Holy Spirit in history" (xvii). The wisdom of man seeking a unified vision of the whole of reality [End... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:From Feasting to Fasting: The Evolution of a Sin; Attitudes to Food in Late AntiquityJohn F. DonahueVeronika E. Grimm. From Feasting to Fasting: The Evolution of a Sin; Attitudes to Food in Late Antiquity. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. x 1 294 pp. Cloth, $49.95.The role of food in the ancient world has been the focus of much attention in recent years, as both Greek and Roman (...) dining practices have been examined from a number of perspectives—sociological, anthropological, and semiotic, to name but a few. Noticeably absent, however, has been any sustained study of attitudes toward feasting and fasting in major early Christian writers. Veronika Grimm attempts to correct this deficiency by clarifying the social [End Page 655] and symbolic meanings given to food, eating, and fasting in the writings of those who shaped Christian thinking from the first to the fifth century.Chapters 1 and 2 offer necessary background by surveying both Jewish and Graeco-Roman attitudes toward feasting and fasting. Here we come to an essential difference between the two cultures. For the Jew, food and fasting were part of an ethical conduct, the rules for which were given by God. The result was a keen interest in fasting to serve as “penitence, expiation for transgression, the humbling of the self in order to arouse the pity of the Deity” (32). Even so, this focus never implied dualistic negation of “the flesh,” except with Platonic Philo. On the other hand, pagan gods expected worship and sacrifice, yet showed little interest in regulating the daily life of worshipers, what they ate, or with whom they slept. As Grimm reveals, people worked the rules out for themselves, physicians set guidelines for physical well-being, and philosophers stressed moderation as the appropriate human conduct concerning food.Grimm devotes the remainder of her study to a chronological review of feasting and fasting in the works of the principal early Christian writers, beginning with Paul (chapter 3) and continuing with the Acts of the Apostles (chapter 4), Clement of Alexandria (chapter 5), Tertullian (chapter 6), and Origen and Eusebius (chapter 7). Two concluding chapters trace attitudes to food and feasting in ascetic propaganda and practice in the works of Jerome and Augustine.Within these chapters lies the author’s central achievement: the charting of a course from occasional fasting to active self-denial. Thus, writing in the early years of the Church, Paul and the apostles emphasize the religious significance of the celebration and sharing of food but place little value on fasting as an ascetic or religious practice. By the late second and early third centuries, Clement of Alexandria, heavily influenced by Philo, neither regards food as a religious issue nor promotes fasting; nevertheless, he pleads for moderation and decorum in eating, drinking, and sexual activity. Origen, another Alexandrian of the third century, exhibits similar views, despite Eusebius’ attempts to cast him as the stereotypical “holy man” in his Ecclesiastical History. Tertullian, a contemporary of Clement’s from North Africa, reveals an even stronger revulsion from sexuality and, more importantly, holds the distinction of being the first Christian propagandist of expiatory fasting whose writings survive. In Grimm’s analysis it is clearly Jerome, however, who emerges in the fourth century as the true advocate of fasting, especially as an antidote to sexual appetite in women. She portrays him as a spirited supporter of anorexia and as one obsessed with the dangers of sexual temptation. Similarly, Grimm views Augustine’s ascetic program of corporal self-management as perilously approaching anorectic behavior.Thanks to Grimm’s careful treatment of the relevant texts and her professional training as a psychologist, there is much of value in these pages, especially her insights into the relationship between eating and physical, mental, and [End Page 656] spiritual well-being in the ancient world. Even so, a few minor concerns persist. First, her assertion that the Gospels “have no special message concerning food” (74) is puzzling, given that the evangelists frequently mention banquets, both earthly and divine, in their writings. Second, Grimm’s longest chapter, on Graeco-Roman attitudes toward food and fasting, seems to be her most problematic. She cites... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Metaphysics of Creation. Aquinas's Natural Theology in Summa contra gentiles IIE.J. AshworthNorman Kretzmann. The Metaphysics of Creation. Aquinas's Natural Theology in Summa contra gentiles II. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. Pp. xiii + 483. Cloth, $65.00.Thomas Aquinas is astounding not just for the richness, complexity and timeless interest of his thought, but for the sheer bulk of his works. The challenge this bulk presents to commentators has been (...) taken up in various ways. Some people focus on Aquinas's architectonic, giving a global overview of individual works in such terms as the neo-Platonic exitus-reditus schema; others focus on the interplay of faith and reason in his works by classifying Aquinas as a theologian, or a Christian philosopher, or a philosopher-theologian; still others try to organize his thought by bringing together thematically-linked discussions from a variety of places. All three approaches tend to overlook perhaps the most striking feature of Aquinas's writings: the continuous progression of carefully-formulated, detailed arguments and sub-arguments.In the second book of his uncompleted trilogy on Summa contra gentiles, Norman Kretzmann combines the best of the first two approaches to Aquinas with an impressive and largely successful attempt to come to terms with Aquinas as an arguer. He takes an ample selection of Aquinas's own arguments in their order of appearance in SCG II; he analyzes their premisses; he shows how they function in relation to earlier and later arguments; and he criticizes their weaknesses. He does all this in an elegant, lucid prose that ensures the attentive reader an enhanced understanding of the specific topics discussed by Aquinas. [End Page 434]To understand the full import of the arguments examined, however, we need to consider what Aquinas hopes to achieve by his sequences of arguments. While granting that Aquinas is a theologian, and that he intends his Summa contra gentiles to give a full account of what Christians believe, Kretzmann argues that the first three books of SCG present a fully-developed natural theology which can serve as guide and inspiration to thinkers today. The key to understanding Aquinas here is the recognition that the philosopher, particularly the metaphysician, is, or should be, concerned with the first principles and most ultimate aspects of reality. If it turns out, as most philosophers before the twentieth century have believed, that these first principles are divine, then truths taught by revelation can be integrated with truths arrived at by reason. Moreover, once the existence and nature of God have been established, or at least rendered plausible, one can take God as a starting point for the explanation of this-worldly phenomena, from the nature of the physical world to the nature of the human person. This explanation, while buttressed by references to Biblical revelation, will nonetheless be fully natural, insofar as it relies on arguments whose premisses are those available to any rational being independently of revelation.In his earlier book, The Metaphysics of Theism (Oxford, 1997) Kretzmann examined the start of Aquinas's natural theology, the movement from things around us to God. In The Metaphysics of Creation, finished just before his death, Kretzmann takes up the emergence of things from God. The book is divided into three unequal parts. First, there is a long discussion of Aquinas's view of creation, and the precise way in which the world is dependent upon God, its first cause. Particularly notable in this section is the discussion of Aquinas's view that creation is compatible with the notion of a beginningless world. The second, very brief, section takes up Aquinas's treatment of the emergence of different species, and his willingness to reject the kind of literal reading of Genesis espoused by contemporary creationists. The third and longest section takes up the nature of the human mind or soul. What makes this section particularly interesting is its emphasis on the implications of the top-down approach. If we start with the ideas that God is a pure intellect, and that immaterial substance is possible, then the mind-body problem becomes that of explaining how intellect can ever be closely related to matter, rather that... (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)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE USE OF SCRIPTURE AND THE RENEWAL OF MORAL THEOLOGY: THE CATECHISM AND VERITATIS SPLENDOR 1 SERVAIS PINCKAERS, 0.P. L'Universite de Fribourg Fribourg, Switzerland T.HE SECOND Vatican Council ratified the biblical reewal that had prepared it. It truly gave Scripture back o the Catholic people and recommended it as " the very soul of sacred theology." 2 The Council invited theologians to show the inner coherence of the mysteries (...) of salvation proposed by the Scriptures. They were exhorted to make use of the teaching of the Fathers and to engage in speculative reflection, with St. Thomas as a guide, in order to search for the solutions to human problems in a manner suitable to contemporary man. In particular, the Council affirmed : Special care should be given to the perfecting of moral theology. Its scientific presentation should draw more fully on the teaching of holy Scripture and should throw light upon the exalted vocation of the faithful in Christ and their obligation to bring forth fruit in charity for the life of the world.3 The document on the formation of future priests published on February 22, 1976 by the Congregation for Catholic Education 1 This paper was presented at the Theological Consultation of American Bishops at the Pontifical North American College in Rome, September 12, 1994. The English translation was prepared by Sister Mary Thomas Noble, O.P. 2Dei Verbum 24; English translation by Liam Walsh,O.P., Vatican Council II, ed. Austin Flannery, O.P., revised edition, (Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 1992), 764. See 0Ptatam totius 16. s Optatam totius 16; English translation by B. Hayes, S.M., S. Fagan, S.M., and Austin Flannery, O.P., Vatican Council II, 720. 1 2 SERVAIS PINCKAERS, O.P. makes the directives in this conciliar text beautifully explicit and helps us to perceive its main lines. Notably, it states : In the past, moral theology exhibited at times a certain narrowness of vision and some lacunas. This was due in large part to a kind of legalism, to an individualistic orientation, and to a separation from the sources of Revelation. To counter all this,... it is necessary to clarify the method by which moral theology ought to be developed in close contact with Holy Scripture (n. 96). The Catechism of the Catholic Church and the encyclical V eritatis Splendor have each in its own way effected the reestablishment of the bonds between Scripture and moral theology. I propose to touch upon the principal points of this scriptural renewal in the teaching of moral theology. In order to get an idea of the novelty of these recent developments, a comparison will help. We shall look at the presentation of Catholic moral teaching given in the manuals which have served as textbooks in seminaries and which have oriented preaching and moral catechesis over the last four centuries, following the Council of Trent. These manuals developed and transmitted a certain systematization of moral theology based on categories which have become classic. Even those who criticize the manuals, proportionalists and consequentialists, for example, still use these categories. The moral theory of the manuals constitutes a common cultural base, one whose concepts and categories (for the most part connected with certain currents in modern philosophy such as Kantian ethics) have exercised a determining role in the relationship between the teaching of Christian ethics and Scripture. In our effort to delineate the principal elements of scriptural renewal proposed to us by the Catechism and the Encyclical, we shall examine six points: firstly, the use of Scripture; next, the great moral texts it offers us, the Decalogue, the Sermon on the Mount, apostolic catechesis, and the treatment of cases of conscience ; finally, we shall respond to the difficulty created by new ethical problems and by recent cultural changes. CATECHISM AND VERITATIS SPLENDOR 3 I. SCRIPTURAL QUOTATIONS We need only run through the moral section of the Catechism to see that Biblical citations are there far more numerous than in the manuals of former times. These citations appear even in the section titles, such as " Life in Christ" and " Life in the Spirit," taken from Saint Paul in order to describe the moral life. The table of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Jacob Burckhardt, Religion, and the Historiography of “Crisis” and “Transition”Thomas Albert Howard*A great historical subject, the representation of which should be the high point of a historian’s life, must cohere sympathetically and mysteriously to the author’s innermost being.Jacob Burckhardt 1If you are to venture to interpret the past you can do so only out of the fullest exertion of the vigor of the present: only when you can put (...) forth your... qualities in all their strength will you divine what is worth knowing and preserving in the past.Friedrich Nietzsche 2The renowned nineteenth-century Swiss-German historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97) was a masterful historian of crises and transitional periods. Two of his major works, The Age of Constantine the Great (1852) and The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), bear out this claim. In his Constantine Burckhardt deals with the transition from late pagan antiquity to the early Christian Middle Ages, and in his more famous Renaissance he deals with the transition from the late Middle Ages to the beginnings of secular modernity. In the [End Page 149] latter, as is well known, he established one of the most compelling and creative theses in the history of modern historiography, virtually creating the “idea of the Renaissance” that has long influenced both scholarly and popular conceptions of that period. 3What elicited Burckhardt’s interest in crises and transitions in general and in these two periods of crisis and transition in particular? In this article, I shall argue that there is a strong relationship between Burckhardt’s own historical experience in the early and mid-nineteenth century and his choice of subject and mode of analysis in these two monumental works. In theoretical terms one observes a “dialectical” form of objectivity in the execution of Burckhardt’s historiographical tasks: a structural affinity or kinship between subject (Burckhardt, his historical experience) and object (late antiquity, Renaissance) predisposes Burckhardt to his theme/argument and thus provides a key to understanding the genesis and the character of insights that he offers in these two works. 4 To establish this point I shall focus on the category of religion, on Burckhardt’s own experience of questions of religious truth and skepticism in the nineteenth century, and on his treatment of religion in these two works.The Young Jacob Burckhardt and ReligionReligion is a crucial but often neglected aspect of Jacob Burckhardt’s thought. 5 Like a number of nineteenth-century German intellectuals, Burckhardt was a Pfarrersohn, a “pastor’s son.” 6 He grew up in a profoundly conservative Protestant environment in Basel, nicknamed “pious Basel” for its dogged resistance to the “ideas of 1789” and for its earlier heritage of Reformation and pietist religiosity. During Burckhardt’s youth in fact, his father was a children’s minister and head-deacon (Obersthelfer) before becoming in 1838 the city cathedral’s Antistes, the highest and most prestigious ecclesiastical office in Basel. In short, as his biographer Werner Kaegi has noted, Burckhardt’s early [End Page 150] upbringing and education were strongly shaped by the world of his father, a world of “old Protestant piety.” 7Following his father’s example, Burckhardt started out on the clerical track, studying theology at the University of Basel. However, during his Theologie-studium (1837–39) he experienced a profound crisis of faith brought on by an encounter with German historical biblical criticism and liberal theology represented in the person of W. M. L. de Wette (1780–1848). A radical theologian and biblical scholar, de Wette had wound up in Basel in 1822 after being dismissed from the University of Berlin for holding views considered heterodox and politically threatening by the conservative Prussian government. 8 In a letter to his friend Johannes Riggenbach written in August 1838 Burckhardt tells how de Wette’s critical theology had unseated his faith. “In my eyes,” Burckhardt wrote,de Wette’s system grows in stature every day; one simply must follow him, there is no alternative; but every day a part of our traditional church doctrine melts away under his hand. Today, finally, I realized that he regards the birth of Christ simply as a myth... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:In Memoriam:Brother Wayne TeasdaleJennifer HarrisOn 20 October 2004, Wayne Teasdale died at age 59. After his second battle with cancer, he passed on, leaving numerous friends, loved ones, and students. Wayne was a world-renowned spiritual teacher and scholar who worked tirelessly to create dialogue and understanding among the world's religions. Wayne was the leading voice in the Christian contemplative movement.In particular, Wayne Teasdale met often with His Holiness the (...) Dalai Lama to discuss their faiths. In his own words, "I am convinced that Christianity and Buddhism together have a unique opportunity and responsibility to enter into a sustained dialogue on all matters.... If the two traditions work together on resolving the critical issues facing the planet, and if they commit themselves to an open-ended dialogue process in which mutual influence on each other occurs in the areas of belief or view, prayer, and social engagement, they will make an enormously precious contribution towards the communication of a new consciousness all around the world."For more than ten years, Brother Wayne Teasdale studied, prayed, and meditated in the seclusion of Hundred Acres Monastery in New Hampshire. In 1986, Father Bede Griffiths, an English Benedictine monk living in India, invited Wayne to his ashram to take sannyasa (Indian monkhood) from him as a Christian. Sannyasa formally means to renounce the world. This event began Wayne's work as an interreligious monk and mystic. Through his writings, Wayne has helped thousands of individuals to understand their own true paths and explored the idea of renunciation and spirituality in daily life.Wayne Teasdale served on the board of trustees of the Parliament of the World's Religions and was the coordinator of the Bede Griffiths International Trust. Wayne dedicated himself to helping people discover their true spiritual nature and was a passionate activist who worked throughout his life to create dialogue and mutual understanding among the world's religions. He is the author of many seminal books, most notably The Mystic Heart: Discovering a Universal Spirituality in the World's Religions and A Monk in the World: Cultivating a Spiritual Life. His other books include Catholicism in Dialogue: Conversations Across Traditions; Come and Sit: A Week Inside Meditation Centers; Hermitage of the Heart: Contemplative Practices from Hundred Acres Monastery; Community of Religions: Voices and Images of the Parliament of the World's Religions; Essays in Mysticism; Yoga of Sound: Healing and Enlightenment through the Sacred Practice of Mantra (with Russill Paul); Bede Griffiths: An Introduction to His Interspiritual Thought (with Bede Griffiths); Awakening the Spirit, Inspiring the Soul: 30 Stories of Interspiritual Discovery in the Community of Faiths (with Martha Howard, MD), and Mystic Hours: A Daybook of Inspirational Wisdom and Devotion. [End Page 163]Wayne was the leader of the Interfaith Call for Freedom of Worship and Human Rights in Tibet. He was a member of the Monastic Interreligous Dialogue and helped draft their Universal Declaration on Nonviolence. He was an adjunct professor at DePaul University, Columbia College, and the Catholic Theological Union, and lectured throughout the world.In his life and teachings, Wayne always promoted the concepts of community, service, and faith. He said, "We now know that each one of us inhabits, rather than possesses, what can be called local awareness. It makes our life tangible by filtering it through parameters of knowing and being that allow for this local type of consciousness, this knowing person here and now who is self-aware. When someone has a mystical experience, he or she is propelled into a cosmic kind of perception. The enlightened are those who have broken out of their local and regional, or individual and species awareness and have discovered other realms of consciousness beyond this sphere."Jennifer HarrisFriends of Drepung Gomang MonasteryCopyright © 2005 The University of Hawai'i Press... (shrink)

This essay traces Hegel's conceptualisation of “the spirit and the letter”, from the period of his early theological writings to that of the Science of Logic, with particular reference to his correspondence. This dialectic, for Hegel, concerns the realisation of the truth or “spirit” of something from the specificity and fixity of its particular details – its “letter”. It also concerns, then, the freedom to interpret the spirit of something in spite of the apparent (...) authority of any supposed original meanings or authorial intentions. We find him using the phrase in a variety of contexts, with reference to politics, Biblical hermeneutics, textual criticism, the history of philosophy and education. While originally derived from St Paul's dictum – “the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Cor 3:6) – Hegel's early invocations of “the spirit and the letter” are inspired by Fichte, who sought to distinguish the spirit from the letter of Kant's philosophy. However, while Fichte conceives of the “spirit” as an “aesthetic sense” with which to take creative liberties with the letter, the later Hegel finds that it is only by tarrying with the contradictions of the dead letter that the spirit might be brought to life. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 529 any agent qualitatively identical with S would do A in a situation qualitatively identical with S's" (257). (14) The " would " in the above statement is the " would " of Molina, and the author acknowledges that his theory resembles that of Molina (262). For a reader who cannot swallow Molina's "futurihles," a good deal of Leftow's argument falls apart. In the end, then, we (...) have here a hook that verges on the monumental hut that will he diversely judged-as is normally the caseaccording to the philosophic stance of the reader. Surely it is a hook that cannot he ignored. JAMES w. FELT, S.J. Santa Clara University Santa Clara, California Wittgenstein on Ethics and Religious Belief. By CYRIL BARRETT. Oxford : Basil Blackwell, 1991. Pp. xiv + 285. $44.95 (cloth). Since his editorship in 1974 of the volume Lectures and Conversa· tions: Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief, Cyril Barrett's name has been associated with the interpretation of Wittgenstein's views on ethics and religious belief. At last we have in hook form his comprehensive exposition of this important dimension of the philosopher's thought. Barrett ranges from the Notebooks 1914-1916 all the way to remarks in On Certainty that stem from only a few days before Wittgenstein 's death. In addition to placing pertinent remarks of early and late periods in the context of the relevant major works and their chief themes, Barrett also expounds and analyses such shorter, more explicit treatments of ethics and religious belief as the " Lecture on Ethics," the "Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough," and the remarks collected in Vermischte Bemerkungen (Remarks on Culture and Value). The hook is sympathetic in tone-perhaps too much so. The reader quite often feels-as I will make plain in what follows-that Barrett interprets Wittgenstein in a way that obscures the strangeness of his thought, tending to assimilate it too readily to the mainstream of Western theological reflection. Barrett has a three-fold program: "to show that (a) what Wittgen· stein has to say on ethics and religious belief was for him of the ut· most importance, if not sole importance; (h) his views on these subjects did not radically alter throughout his life, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding; and (c) what Wittgenstein said about ethics was intimately interwoven with what he said about religious belief " (xiv). The elements of this program call for different sorts of evalua· 530 BOOK REVIEWS tion. Clearly Wittgenstein thought ethics and religious belief were im· portant. So the question is whether Barrett's claim, that for Wittgen· stein they are the most important elements of his work or even the only important elements of his work, is an exaggeration. Barrett takes as determinative such remarks as Wittgenstein's statement to Ludwig Ficker that the point of the Tractatus is ethical, and he must explain or discount the fact that the vast hulk of his work has little obvious hearing on ethics or religion. Or if the hulk of that work is ethical and religious, then these terms come to mean, in a Wittgensteinian context, something quite different from their senses in Barrett's somewhat domesticated reading. As for the third element in the program-the interweaving of ethics and religion-this, too, is a question of degree. And the question is whether Barrett's analysis, keeping as it does to relatively standard notions of what constitutes religious belief, really does justice to Wittgenstein's insistence that religion must he a way of life rather than a body of doctrine. But it is Barrett's second thesis which is most interesting, most difficult to understand, and most promising, if it is true, for helping us to understand Wittgenstein's thought on ethics and religion. Barrett writes: " Wittgenstein did not abandon his earlier views on ethics and religious belief with their attendant notions of the mystical, transcendental, inexpressible, viewing sub specie aetemitate.... (T) here is no compelling reason to assume such a radical change of view and... all the features of the earlier views can he fitted into the new conceptions of language-games and forms of life" (xiii). Can it he that what Wittgenstein has to... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Consistently Pro-Life: The Ethics of Bloodshed in Ancient Christianity by Rob Arner, and: Christ at the Checkpoint: Theology in the Service of Justice and Peace ed. by Paul Alexander, and: Becoming Nonviolent Peacemakers: A Virtue Ethic for Catholic Social Teaching and US Policy by Eli Sarasan McCarthyBrian D. BerryReview of Consistently Pro-Life: The Ethics of Bloodshed in Ancient Christianity ROB ARNER Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2010. 136 (...) pp. $15.56Review of Christ at the Checkpoint: Theology in the Service of Justice and Peace EDITED BY PAUL ALEXANDER Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2012. 182 pp. $19.80Review of Becoming Nonviolent Peacemakers: A Virtue Ethic for Catholic Social Teaching and US Policy ELI SARASAN MCCARTHY Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2012. 259 pp. $27.00In Consistently Pro-Life, Rob Arner (who teaches at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia) makes the case that Christians should not kill other human beings—regardless of the circumstances. Taking as his point of departure the vigilante killing of abortion doctor George Tiller in Wichita, Kansas, in 2009, he argues not only that abortion is always morally impermissible but so also is [End Page 217] the murder of abortion doctors and the use of the death penalty to punish those who murder them. In addition, he turns to the early church fathers to contend that, prior to Constantine, “without exception, the church strongly condemned the taking of human life in any form whatsoever”—thus rejecting abortion and infanticide, the blood sport of the Roman games, suicide, and killing in war (120). This was because the New Testament witness to Jesus and his death on the cross required early Christians to view “the means as just as important, if not more important, than the ends” (xiii).Arner supplements this deontological argument for Christian pacifism, which he learned from John Howard Yoder, with a brief consideration of the virtue of patience cultivated in the early churches, reflecting the influence of Stanley Hauerwas on his thought. This “cardinal virtue” connoting “longsuffering, forbearance, patient endurance”—as found in Jesus’s teaching in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5:38–48)—enabled early Christians to practice non-violent resistance “deferring personal revenge in favor of God’s vindicating justice” (98). If Christians were to adopt this same consistently pro-life ethic today, argues Arner, it would “lead to greater healing and peace in our blood-soaked world” (121). The book closes with three appendices—one of which is a chart of terminology that dehumanizes vulnerable victims, including unborn human beings. Unfortunately, the book does not have an index.Christ at the Checkpoint, edited by Paul Alexander (professor of Christian ethics and public policy at the Palmer Theological Seminary of Eastern University), includes thirteen plenary addresses delivered at a conference on the Arab-Israeli conflict organized by Palestinian Evangelical Christians at Bethlehem Bible College in March 2010. Almost all of the contributors to this volume—including biblical scholars, theologians, ethicists, pastors, activists, and others—criticize the ideology of Christian Zionism and its support of a theology of dispensationalism that, in their view, distorts the scriptures and fosters violence rather than reconciliation between the Israelis and the Palestinians. In his own presentation titled “What Can Pentecostals and Charismatics Do for Peace with Justice in Israel and Palestine?,” Alexander—who describes himself as a former “one-sided” Christian Zionist who later discovered the writings of Yoder and Hauerwas—appeals to Jesus’s teaching in the Sermon on the Mount and urges Pentecostals to create church communities “that cultivate persons of character and conviction, who through habits, practices, and action live out the core of our faith” (69). Along with being faithful to the “greater challenges” of love, mercy, compassion, and forgiveness, he argues that they should publicly declare that Jesus does not want Israel to continue the occupation of Palestine, and they should engage in the “easier tasks” of promoting human rights, lending support to United Nations Resolutions, and working toward a two-state solution (72). “The time has come in human history,” writes Alexander, “for Pentecostals to speak and act prophetically regarding this present injustice … [End Page 218] and to use every nonviolent weapon in our arsenal—stories, preaching... (shrink)

This essay explores the significance of Hegel’s considerations of love for his later dialectical philosophy in order to bring to attention love’s continued import as a category of logical and theological unity and reconciliation. A lingering question for Hegel scholarship is why he seemingly drops the unifying notion of love in his more developed dialectical philosophy, choosing instead to expound a philosophy of the concept that solely grants to reason the task of dialectical recovery. On my (...) reading, this interpretation suffers from a failure to imagine Hegel’s early writings on love as contributing to the working out of his later dialectical logic and philosophy of spirit, specifically in terms of the unifying and reconciling principle of Vernunft in contrast to Verstand. Furthermore, Hegel’s substantial appeals to love in the later Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion show love's continued significance for him, not only as a logical but a theological principle of unity between finite and infinite spirit, a unity lost on the understanding alone. Reading Hegel’s Vernunft as a form of rationally reconciling love, therefore, shows a continuity in Hegel’s thinking that brings to bear Hegel’s later philosophical developments of reason and spirit on his philosophical theology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Coleridge’s Intellectual Intuition, the Vision of God, and the Walled Garden of “Kubla Khan”Douglas HedleyIn his seminal work of 1917 Das Heilige Rudolph Otto quotes a number of passages as instances of the “Numinose.” Alongside those quotations from more conventional mystics, Plotinus, and Augustine, Otto refers to Coleridge’s “savage place” in Kubla Khan. 1 It is also pertinent that, when trying to define Romanticism, C. S. Lewis appeals to (...) the longing for the “unnameable something” fired by “morning cobwebs in late summer” or the “opening lines of Kubla Khan.” 2 Perhaps it is a mere coincidence that two of the most penetrating and influential scholars of religion in the twentieth century should appeal to Coleridge and his poem “Kubla Khan.” I wish to suggest reasons why the link between the imagery of “Kubla Khan” and a mystical experience of transcendence is not merely fortuitous. Indeed the connection between Coleridge’s mature writing and the imagery of the poem shows that we have good reason for seeing him as consciously writing, both as a poet and as a philosopher, within a visionary mystical tradition. I propose that it is no accident that Coleridge’s most visionary poem draws upon the central Christian image of paradise: the walled garden.This is an attempt not to interpret “Kubla Khan” but rather to suggest Coleridge’s place in the history of ideas as a Christian poet and philosopher. He is best described as an essentially speculative and mystical philosopher-theologian. 3 [End Page 115] By “speculative” I mean a theology inspired by those Church Fathers who emphasize the “vision” of God as an intellectual contemplation (speculari) of the transcendent Absolute, the prius of all being. The scholastics, the medieval German mystics, the Cambridge Platonists, and some of the German Idealists have all been influenced by such a speculative impulse. 4 Hegel uses the term “speculative” for his Dialectic. 5A philosophical or “speculative” approach to theology has invoked hostility from Tertullian onwards. Coleridge’s philosophy of religion often excited the fear of the new pantheistic German theology. John Henry Newman castigated Coleridge’s speculation as more heathen than Christian. Yet the speculative movement in theology spawned both a radical and a conservative wing, and we have to judge Coleridge’s thought in the light of the more conservative branch of nineteenth-century Idealism. D. F. Strauss jettisoned the transcendent “yonder” of traditional theology in favor of his philosophical or “scientific” approach to Christianity. Coleridge, however, could not adhere to theology of immanence; he wished to present a theology of an adamantly transcendent character.The walled garden is an eminently appropriate image of transcendence and was used as such by the fifteenth-century Christian Platonist Nicholas of Cusa, who is one of the links between Patristic theology and German Idealism. I shall draw upon his book The Vision of God as a paradigm of the sort of speculative mysticism which informs Coleridge’s metaphysics and much of his poetry. 6 Reflection upon an exotic poetic image may help us to clarify one of Coleridge’s philosophical tenets; the walled garden can be seen to symbolize that transcendent numinous reality, which the soul inchoately and barely consciously seeks and strives for.Coleridge’s “Mysticism” and the Imagery of “Kubla Khan”Richard Holmes claims that the “Kubla Khan” provides evidence of a transition in Coleridge’s interests and presents this switch from “classical and religious mythology” to the “drama of self-knowledge... the growth of consciousness and civilisation” as a key to Coleridge’s poetry. Holmes writes: [End Page 116][H]is instinct that the modern Epic subject must now centre on “the mind of man,” through “travels, voyages and histories,” shows a shift of poetic focus characteristic of the new Romantic age. The Epic could no longer draw on classical or religious mythology for the framework of its action. It must become contemporary with the world of scientific, anthropological, and psychological exploration: it must centre in some way on the drama of self-knowledge, on the growth of consciousness and civilisation. 7Coleridge would not have seen a conflict between the drama of self-consciousness and classical and religious mythology. In “Kubla... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Controversy Between Schelling and Jacobi LEWIS S. FORD SCHELLING, ALONGWITH FICHTE, has suffered the fate of being labelled one of tIegel's predecessors. Richard Kroner provides the classic expression of this viewpoint in his monumental study, Von Kant bis Hegel, which examines Schelling's thought primarily for its contribution to Hegel's final synthesis.I In English we have Josiah Royce's sympathetic and lively account of Schelling's early romantic exuberance, (...) regarded as a transitional stage in the development of German idealism. 2 But this emphasis on the early ScheUing has led to an unfortunate neglect of his work subsequent to the break with Hegel in 1807. Schelling's romanticism, so ably documented by E. D. Hirsch, Jr., 3 can only be regarded as one phase in the total sweep of his thought, for, after the break with Hegel, Schelling produced at least three major works: the essay •ber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit,4 wrestling with the problem of evil and human freedom, the fragmentary Weltalter, 5 which in scope and dialectical intricacy should be compared with Hegel's Logic, and the Philosophie der Mythologie und Offenbarung, 6 furnishing a fundamental critique of the whole dialectical enterprise. Save for the essay on human freedom, however, none of these works were published during his lifetinm, as Schelling withdrew from the public eye after his controversies with Hegel and Jacobi. Thus the publishing histories of Schelling and Hegel are exactly reverse. Schelling rushed into print his early speculative gropings, while Hegel suppressed his/making the Ph~nomenologic des Geistes his first major publication. Then while Hegel's Logic and Encyclopedia were being publicly acclaimed, Schelling remained silent. This accident of history is largely responsible for the illusion that Schelling is the older of the two x (Tiibingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1921-24),2 vols. 2The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1892), Lecture VI, 164-189. Wordsworth and ScheUing, A Typological Study of Romanticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960),Yale Studies in English, Vol. CXLV. 4Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph yon Sehelling, Philosophische Untersuchungen i~berdas Wesen der menschlichen Freyheit und die damit zusaramenhdngenden Gegenstdnde, 1809. Reprinted in the Sdmmtliche Werke, Erste Abtheilung, VII. Band (Stuttgart und Augsburg: J. G. Cotta, 1856), 331-416. English translation by James Gutmann: Of Human Freedom (Chicago: Open Court, 1936). 5Three fragmentary versions of the Weltalter have been published. The Urfassungen of 1811 and 1813were edited by Manfrcd SehrSter and published as a separate Naehlassband to the M~nchener Jubildumsausgabe of the collected works: Die Weltalter, Fragmente (Munich: Biederstein, Leibniz, 1946). A later version is published in S.W. I: 8, pp. 195-344,which has been translated by Frederick de Wolfe Bolman, Jr. : The Ages of the World (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1942). 6Philosophie der Mythologie is published in S.W. II: 1-2; Philosophie der Offenbarung in S.W. II: 3-4. These essays were first collected and published by Herman Nohl in Hegels theologische Jugendschriften (Tiibingen: 1907).T. M. Knox translated them into English, with an introduction by Richard Kroner: GeorgWilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Early Theological Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948). [75] 76 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY thinkers (actually he was five years Hegel's junior), who retired from the philosophical scene after making his contribution to the Hegelian synthesis. Paul Tillich's doctoral dissertations s and Ernst Cassirer's studies in post-Kantian thought 9 made serious inroads on this conception, yet the iIInsion persisted. Their insistence on the importance of the later Schelling has been brilliantly sustained by two recent studies: Horst Fuhrmans's Schellings Philosophie der Weltalter1~and Walter Schulz's Die Vollendung des deutschen Idealismus in der Spdtphilosophie Schellings, ~ and we may hope that the conventional estimate of Schelling will be drastically revised. Fuhrmans has demonstrated that the split between the early and the later Schelling must be placed in the year 1806 when he came in contact with Franz yon Bander in Munich, who encouraged him to delve deeper into the theological and cosmological ramifications of Jacob Boehme's thought. TM The reorientation this caused is apparent in the essay on human freedom, published in 1809, but it was not fully exploited until the... (shrink)

It is not just rhetoric to ask why we should still be reading the Young Hegelians today. In spite of their commitment to action, their influence on the politics of the times was marginal at best; and even as philosophers, the movement of thought which they represented was all but dead by 1848. Now that we read them at a distance of over a century, it is clear that for once at least the fate meted out by circumstances was well (...) deserved. The writings of the Young Hegelians appear painfully thin in insight and force of argument. This global judgment must of course be qualified. Protestant theology has not been the same since David Strauss, and Feuerbach’s conception of man stands as the first statement of modern scientific humanism. Still, the ideal of humanity that inspired either of them has none of the historical richness of Hegel’s “spirit”; in the case of Feuerbach there is also none of the scholarship that redeems at least some of Strauss’ work. The value of both men’s writings lay mostly in their iconoclastic nature. They cleared the air, though at the cost of grave oversimplifications, of the illusion that after Hegel things could quite ever be the same again - as if the speculative comprehension of the Christian faith that Hegel claimed to have achieved could have left that faith undisturbed. But now that the profane has become the commonplace, there is little to recommend them in our eyes; and now that we have also had plenty of opportunity to notice how quickly the spirit of revolution degenerates into faction and anarchy, there is even less to recommend the rest of the Young Hegelians. The later Marx stands out intellectually in comparison to them precisely because he succeeded in breaking free from their ideological hold. I sometimes wonder whether his figure has really been enhanced by the post-war attempt at reinterpreting Capital in the light of his supposed earlier “humanism.” Sidney Hook’s statement that the late Marx was a scientist, and that his theory is to be proven either right or wrong on strictly historical and empirical evidence, might be a bit far-fetched perhaps; it still is in my mind the best compliment that one can pay to Marx. (shrink)

The study of Hegel’s ethical thought has focused traditionally on the Phenomenology, the early writing or his Philosophy of Right but has mostly ignored the treatment of the idea of the good in the Science of Logic. This paper is an attempt at a close reading of Hegel’s exposition in light of the methodological and foundational claims of speculative logic. It identifies several points of equivocation, in particular the notion of a reversal of the logical movement of the (...) Concept back to the subjective standpoint, and the focus on goal and action which replace the proper logical explication of the notion of the good. The paper tries to assess the meaning and consequences of what we see as points of weakness in Hegel’s exposition and formulate questions for further discussion on a hitherto neglected subject. (shrink)