Authors:Joël Madore Abstract: The idea of God in Levinas is resonant of the First Testament: a voice from higher above that clamors: Thou shall not kill; the unsettling call of the Infinite that commands us to leave the familiar towards the unknown, like “Abraham’s journey who left alone, towards all—from particularity to universality—under the threat of nights and the hope of days, in the words of Maurice Blanchot. Hard, long path of justice.”1 God in Levinas thus echoes the Kantian practical postulates, framing the ethical injunction as both divine and unquestionable, and will constitute his answer to the imperative of Auschwitz. Though necessary, the law of the State is insufficient to resist the violence of tyranny. Ultimately, the sanction against murder is enforced by God, the Invisible made visible through the face of the Other. As such, justice for Levinas consists not only in serving the latter, but to do so unconditionally because he opens up to the divine. Ethics is thus articulated as the movement towards an Other who reveals an absolute difference alone capable of interrupting the homogenizing impulses of politics. PubDate: 2018-03-14 Issue No:Vol. 9 (2018)
Authors:David Leo Tracey Abstract: Nietzsche tells us that he is more interested in the idea of God than in God as such. The idea of God is not a mind-independent entity; it is a human idea. He writes: “In former times, one sought to prove that there is no God—today one indicates how the belief that there is a God could arise and how this belief acquired its weight and importance.”1 He continues, “The ‘kingdom of heaven’ is a state of the heart—not something lying ‘above the earth’ or coming ‘after death.’”2 And finally, “the kingdom of God does not ‘come’ chronologicallyhistorically, on a certain day … it is an ‘inward change in the individual.’”3 As one commentator writes, Nietzsche asks “a series of questions that concern the religious man, not religion itself.”4 Whether or not one believes in God, the fact that people do believe in God is still a phenomenon in the world for which we must account. Nietzsche’s question is not ‘does God exist'’ It is: why do people believe in God, and what insight does this yield into human psychology' Under the influence of Feuerbach, he answers that “religion can be exhaustively accounted for by the psychology of error,”5 and he demonstrates how basic human psychology accounts for the idea of God. Hence, if naturalism is an attempt to account for phenomena without reference to the supernatural, then showing that human psychology accounts for the idea of a supernatural God is a quintessential instance of naturalism: the idea of God has its origins in nature. PubDate: 2018-03-14 Issue No:Vol. 9 (2018)
Authors:Garth W. Green Abstract: In the following essay, I consider the character, and implications, of the idea of God in Kant’s theoretical philosophy. I first consider the idea (or rather, ‘ideal’) of God in the Critique of Pure Reason, in which it is first established within the systematic structure of Kant’s critical philosophy. In this context, I show that Kant recognized, depicted, and subjected to critique not one, but two such ideas or concepts of God: to evince this point, I examine the more thorough treatment of the concept of God contained in the Lectures on the Philosophical Doctrine of Religion. I then suggest that the full significance of this critique can be comprehended by tracing its effects across the series of texts that constitutes Kant’s philosophy of religion as a unified whole. Herein, I cannot accomplish such a synoptic view: the positive (practical) position of the “postulates” of God and the soul in the Critique of Practical Reason, and the “definition of the concept of religion” in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, for example, will not be considered. Herein, I focus on the Conflict of the Faculties, through which late text I hope to advance a more ample critical context for this, Kant’s redefinition and reposition of the (theological) idea of God, in both an intellectual and an institutional acceptation. While in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant attacks rational theology as such, in the Conflict of the Faculties he attacks the rational and biblical theologian, and the place thereof both in an intra- and an extrauniversity economy. This application, then, evinces the significance of Kant’s idea of God as an element not only of his philosophy of religion narrowly construed, but also as an element of his philosophy of culture more broadly construed. In conclusion, I reflect on the importance of this second, broad acceptation of Kant’s philosophy of religion for contemporary work in the field. PubDate: 2018-03-14 Issue No:Vol. 9 (2018)
Authors:Mario O. D’Souza Abstract: I first found out that I have cancer, and the level of its severity and advanced stage, on the 11th of July, 2017. I had some symptoms like shortness of breath and fatigue, but I attributed them to a pill that I was taking, and which could produce similar side-effects. Subsequent visits to the doctors show that it is in its final stage. PubDate: 2018-03-14 Issue No:Vol. 9 (2018)
Authors:Jean Grondin Abstract: The idea of God is one from which contemporary philosophy, to say nothing of Western society at large, seems to have turned away from or replaced by other quests. There is however no greater and more vital subject than the idea of God. It is essential because it is difficult to see how life can have an overriding meaning if there is no God. Or, as Ivan Karamazov puts it in Dostoyevsky’s novel, if there is no God, all hell breaks loose. For philosophers and inquiring minds, God also happens to be one of the most cogent answers to the question as to why there is Being and not nothing. There is little to be gained by looking down on such an answer, which was revered as the highest Good in all cultures and epochs. PubDate: 2018-02-05 Issue No:Vol. 9 (2018)
Authors:Peter Harris Abstract: In this paper I intend to look at a debate arising in the early Middle Ages which focused on the divine names. The topic was so formulated in the 6th century by the writer who came to be known as the “pseudo-Dionysius” who was in fact a theological writer in the neo-Platonic tradition in the early 6th century whose theological/mystical writings were very influential in the 13th century theological debates. I will refer to him simply as Dionysius. Among his writings is a work titled On the divine Names—St Thomas Aquinas wrote a detailed commentary on this book and came to differ from him not in the commentary but in his own writing in the Summa Theologiae. I am assuming consequently that this discussion should cast some light on the question as to how we should both think and speak about God. PubDate: 2018-02-05 Issue No:Vol. 9 (2018)
Authors:Sean McGrath Abstract: Revelation according to Schelling is not the possession of any institutional form of Christianity; it is not even bound to faith or confession. Rather, revelation disseminates itself freely and universally throughout history. It now inextricably permeates modernity. Schelling’s Philosophy of Revelation does not look backwards to an event in the first century of the common era, it looks forward to the genuine singularity, the moment when humanity will become adequate to the divine subjectivity which lives in it, that is, the penultimate eschaton proclaimed by Paul and the author or the Book of Revelation, the age of righteousness prior to the general resurrection.1 By bringing mythological consciousness to an end and drawing real limits to rationalism (idealism), revelation first establishes a free relation of the human being to the divine. At the same time, revelation liberates philosophy and culture from religion and inaugurates secular consciousness. History, according to the late Schelling, which he undeniably reads Eurocentrically, is moving toward this third age of revelation (after Catholicism and Protestantism), in which all of humanity will pass over into absolute or true monotheism (Trinitarianism). With the universalization of the revelation, the free and philosophical appropriation of its content (what Schelling somewhat misleadingly calls “philosophical religion”), all historical forms of religion will be overcome, including, it should be added, all historical forms of institutional Christianity. The complete secularization of the world will be achieved, and the sundered human community unified, without expense of historical or cultural diversity. PubDate: 2018-02-05 Issue No:Vol. 9 (2018)
Authors:James Gerrie Abstract: In Charles Taylor’s exhaustive study of the historical currents that have helped constitute the modern identity he proposes the notion of “the affirmation of ordinary life” as a way of encapsulating the core of that identity. As he states in Sources of the Self, “ordinary life is a term of art I introduce to designate those aspects of human life concerned with production, that is, labour, the making of things needed for life, and our life as sexual beings, including marriage and the family.”1 According to Taylor, this aspect of the modern identity gives rise to a new sense of the almost inestimable value of individuals and their quotidian existence. This modern sense of identity is informed by a combination of a theistic vision of a created natural order and an ideal of disengaged scientific reasoning as a way of exploring that order, and also a sense of the ultimate value of people and their dignity as moral agents. PubDate: 2018-02-05 Issue No:Vol. 9 (2018)
Authors:Michelle Rebidoux Abstract: Were I to give this paper a subtitle, it would be: “Revisiting the metaphor of the body as house”; and if I were to give it a sub-subtitle, it would be: “The back door, the front door, the bedroom, and the hole in the roof.” In the end I decided not to add these sub-titles, not only for the sake of sheer titular manageability (if I may put it that way), but also because, in doing so, a certain dualism of body and soul or spirit1 might be thereby evoked. Of course, the image of the house as a metaphor for the body⎯a house in which the soul or the spirit dwells, in which perhaps it is even trapped⎯is a familiar one within the Western tradition. Nevertheless, I will be appealing here to the metaphor of the body as a house in the attempt to articulate an idea of God and of the self from within a phenomenology of the body⎯and in doing so, precisely challenging any such dualism. To begin with, by “body” I intend the lived body, bound up in some way with an ipseic phenomenality, itself inseparable from the “sensual” awareness of itself⎯and, of course, the word “sensual,” or “sensuality,” is what precisely is going to be at issue in revisiting the metaphor. Indeed, in the phenomenological literature of recent decades, the word “flesh” is often used to distinguish this ipseic and somehow “sensual” self-awareness from the merely objective body appearing in the world, one object among others, capable of being an object, to some extent, even for the soul or self that “inhabits” it.2 To that extent, if any dualism is to be identified here, it is less that of body and soul or spirit than that of “lived body” and “objective body” or “body object.” PubDate: 2018-02-05 Issue No:Vol. 9 (2018)
Authors:Peter Karl Koritansky Abstract: In this short monograph, Riccardo Saccenti surveys the various and competing interpretations of natural law and natural right from the late Middle Ages through the modern period. As “a survey,” the intention of this book is not so much to advance and defend a central thesis about natural law, but rather to paint a picture of how the various interpreters of natural law have responded to the most important primary texts (of Gratian, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, and John Locke, for example) and to one another. One of the issues with which Saccenti is most concerned is the transition from the medieval understanding of natural law inspired by an Aristotelian concept of nature to a modern theory of natural individual rights. Where exactly does this transition begin and where is it more or less consummated' A reader of this book will be impressed by the complexity of this debate (among others) and the nuances of difference between its participants. Saccenti’s account of it succeeds in exposing the folly of overly simplistic readings of intellectual history that are ideologically motivated, and reminds us what a careful reading of primary and secondary sources can achieve. PubDate: 2018-02-05 Issue No:Vol. 9 (2018)
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