In this paper, we illuminate the basic features of the concept of engagement, which has only become possible in the secular world, with the emergence of the modern individual deprived of any stable, eternal order or hierarchy of values. Still, engagement is not only individual but also collective, as the lack of certainty about the truth affects not only the community and society but also motivates them to follow the same paradigm as the individual – themselves at stake, without knowing (...) where it could possibly lead, but with the intention to produce some tangible and stable socio-cosmic structures that could alleviate man’s uncertainty and thus insecurity. The necessity of engagement stems from the circumstance that man lives in a context saturated with meanings that call him out in advance and influence him. Therefore, engagement means actually acting back to the being-exposed to meanings and structures that have already affected man and his situation. One section of the text deals with an understanding of engagement in the contemporary, “postmodern” era. (shrink)

In _René Girard and Secular Modernity: Christ, Culture, and Crisis_, Scott Cowdell provides the first systematic interpretation of René Girard’s controversial approach to secular modernity. Cowdell identifies the scope, development, and implications of Girard’s thought, the centrality of Christ in Girard's thinking, and, in particular, Girard's distinctive take on the uniqueness and finality of Christ in terms of his impact on Western culture. In Girard’s singular vision, according to Cowdell, secular modernity has emerged thanks to the Bible’s exposure of the (...) cathartic violence that is at the root of religious prohibitions, myths, and rituals. In the literature, the psychology, and most recently the military history of modernity, Girard discerns a consistent slide into an apocalypse that challenges modern ideas of romanticism, individualism, and progressivism._ In the first three chapters, Cowdell examines the three elements of Girard’s basic intellectual vision and brings this vision to a constructive interpretation of “secularization” and “modernity,” as these terms are understood in the broadest sense today. Chapter 4 focuses on modern institutions, chiefly the nation state and the market, that function to restrain the outbreak of violence. And finally, Cowdell discusses the apocalyptic dimension of Girard's theory in relation to modern warfare and terrorism. Here, Cowdell engages with the most recent writings of Girard and applies them to further conversations in cultural theology, political science, and philosophy. Cowdell takes up and extends Girard’s own warning concerning an alternative to a future apocalypse: “What sort of conversion must humans undergo, before it is too late?” "Scott Cowdell's book is the first comprehensive study of modernity and secularity in René Girard's thought. Cowdell brings Girard's theory into a fruitful dialogue with leading approaches on secularization like those of Max Weber, Hans Blumenberg, Peter Berger, and Charles Taylor. Scholars and students of theology, philosophy, and sociology will benefit from this wide-ranging overview of the relationship between religion, modernity, and secularization." — Wolfgang Palaver, Institute of Systematic Theology, University of Innsbruck __ "In a stunning analysis, Cowdell shows that Girard’s sustained intellectual pursuit, which began in the 1960s with his mimetic analysis of modern realist fiction, has always been about the religiosity of the modern and postmodern social condition, even when it has dealt explicitly with the religious origins of antique culture. Cowdell demonstrates the 'highly explanatory and predictive' quality of Girard’s cultural anthropology, within which the 'secular' does not escape the 'religious.' This is a powerful book." — Ann W. Astell, University of Notre Dame __ "Scott Cowdell is one of the most interesting theological voices of his generation. The themes in Cowdell's work are always cosmic and vast in scope. This is a remarkable reading of our contemporary situation through the lens of René Girard. Accurate, informed, and illuminating, Cowdell has written a fabulous book. For the person needing a way into Girard and for the person who is already using Girard's work, Cowdell brings out the implications of Girard for the moment in which we live. An absolutely essential addition to your personal library." — The Very Rev Dr. Ian Markham, Virginia Theological Seminary_. (shrink)

A text, written in 2005 and first published in 2008, exploring the prevalence of non-dualist philosophical and spiritual praxes, inserted from Buddhist and Hindu contexts into a Western postmodern one, in the post-9/11 era of intersecting existential crises: global terrorism/s, environmental urgency, and the geopolitical uncertainty ensuing from maladaptive responses to these security crises, among others. What ethical or philosophical role does the range of neo-nondualistic or neo-idealist metaphysics, East and West, broadly construed, have in engaging the social evolution (...) that might begin to do justice to the nature of such widespread crises? (shrink)

In the Thirties, European personalism was an inspirational philosophical movement, with its birthplace in France, but with proponents and sympathizers in many other countries as well. Following the Second World War, Christian-Democratic politicians translated personalistic ideas into a political doctrine. Sometimes they still refer to personalism, but most often this reference is little more than a nostalgic salute. In the mainstream of Anglo-Saxon political philosophy, there are practically no references to personalistic philosophers. Is personalism exhausted as a philosophy (...) or political ideology? Yes and no. Paul Ricoeur, writing in Esprit , summed up the situation like this: “personalism is dead”, but he was careful to mention a “return of the person”. Indeed, no tradition or movement can simply perpetuate itself. It must, in order to continue making history, always abolish itself as a `system' so as to make room for the unsaid and the unthought in its tradition, an idea that Mounier also fervently believed in.To better situate the current discussion of personalism, however, it is necessary to look back to the original characteristics of personalism in the Thirties. As a response to the crisis provoked by the economic depression, failing democracy and existential uncertainty, there arose in France a number of `non-conformist movements' who labelled themselves personalistic. They did not constitute a unified movement with a commonly shared theory. It was rather a collection of `personalisms'. The article by the historian Christian Roy about the ecological personalism of Bernard Charbonneau and Jacques Ellul sheds interesting light on the multiple origins of French personalism, which is all too easily identified with the work of Maritain and Mounier alone. The work of Jacques Maritain, and the network of writers and artists surrounding him, undoubtedly remains a significant historical reference point when speaking of personalism.Another group was formed around Alexandre Marc who, along with Raymond Aron, Arnaud Dandieu, Daniel-Rops and Denis de Rougemont, kept the journal Ordre Nouveau alive for five years . They elaborated the idea of federalism as a way out of liberalism and totalitarianism. The most important and durable group, however, was formed by the movement and journal Esprit, founded in 1932 by Emmanuel Mounier and George Izard. In order to stress the historical importance of Esprit, we are including here a testimony from 1982, written by Paulette Mounier, the founder's wife, in which she looks back on 50 years of Esprit. After the war, some new and related groups formed, such as Economy and Humanism around Louis-Joseph Lebret. An historical survey of the dissemination of personalistic centres and movements, not only in France but over all of Europe, would be material for a stimulating historical research project. In this issue, there will also be mention of, among others, the Prague personalism of Jan Patocka and Vaclav Havel, the Leuven personalism of Louis Janssens, and the Polish personalism of Tadeusz Mazowiecki and others. But this list is far from exhaustive.What unites these various branches of the personalistic tree? It is a certain conception — or better perhaps: a certain attitude to the human person. Personalists were not seeking in the first instance a new academic theory about the person, but rather a practical philosophy of engagement. In the Thirties, quite a few personalists finished their university studies and chose not for an academic career but for non-conformist, demanding and vulnerable commitments with limited financial means. What motivated them? Primarily a strong sense that the time in which they were living was a turning point, one which was being ignored by the academic world. They interpreted the diverse economic, political and cultural crisis phenomena as symptoms of a more global crisis of civilization which demanded a response through radical change.Hence a certain rhetoric of a `new order', `spiritual revolution', `radical reform' and `rebirth'. But the rhetoric was supported by innovative ideas regarding political federalism, the third way economy and human alienation. The motivation for all this derived from a strong commitment to defend the concrete human person against the arrogance of systems, bureaucracies and ideologies, while at the same time avoiding the pitfalls of individualism — the reason why some personalists always qualified personalism as `communitarian'.In fact, much of what presents itself as communitarian philosophy today is a retrieval of personalistic themes from the Thirties applied to the current situation, a situation which is also interpreted by communitarians as a global cultural crisis. One should not forget, however, that alongside and sometimes opposed to the communitarian theme with its call to bring people back to their communitarian roots, personalists underscored the priority of metaphysics over politics, a theme that can likewise be found in the writings of personalistic dissidents in Eastern Europe. In the words of Mounier in Qu'est-ce que le personnalisme : “personalism combines faith in a certain human absolute with a progressive historical experience”.To what extent is personalistic thinking still relevant today? Its current relevance will be examined in three ways. In the first section, a number of articles are presented which illustrate the active presence of personalistic thought in the domains of politics and applied ethics. Vaclav Havel sent one of his recent addresses in which he links the theme of human rights with that of a world spirituality. His article is preceded by an introduction by Guido Van Heeswijck, situating Prague personalism.The need for an orientational philosophy of the person is not only manifest today in the political arena. Developments in economics, ecology, health care, the media, technology and in the world of the professions have had an extraordinarily large impact on the human person's lifeworld. The whole area of applied ethics requires a dynamic and orientational concept of the person. The contributions by Paul Schotsmans and Luk Bouckaert are seeking a personalistic point of departure for applied ethics. The more historical article by Christian Roy on ecological personalism has been included in the first section because it can be inspiring for an environmental ethics.The second section is more philosophical. To what extent does the `personalistic' conception of the person put forward in the Thirties still have any relevance today, following the waves of structuralism, post-structuralism and postmodernism? Paul Ricoeur's article, Approaching the Human Person — originally published in Esprit in 1990 and now translated for the first time — can be seen as a reference text. Ricoeur shows in what sense the concept of the person must be broadened in order to continue functioning. The person as `narrative identity' can only write history through the medium of language and institutions. Starting from very different assumptions, the articles by Louis Janssens & Joseph Selling and the analysis of Roland Breeur also explore the idea that a person is what he is only when his identity is opened up, touched by an exteriority or conceived as a focal point . It is this radical openness and vulnerability that gives the person its historical and transcendent dynamic, and prevents us from encapsulating it in existing systems, theories and power relations. The connection with Emmanuel Levinas and his hermeneutic of the idea of the infinite is an obvious one to draw.The third section contains a historical survey in which a number of active `personalistic' centres and journals are presented.Various European centres that appeal explicitly to some form of personalistic thinking were posed the following questions: What is the main historical reference to personalism at your centre? and How do you implement, today, a personalist credo in your work? John Dick organized the responses to these questions under a number of headings. This survey aims to provide not so much an exhaustive but a representative picture of the ways in which European personalism lives on as a mosaic of centres engaged in everyday history. (shrink)

Lewis R. Gordon is Professor of Philosophy (and Head of the Department of Philosophy) at the University of Connecticut. His two most recent books are Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (New York: Routledge, 2020) and Fear of Black Consciousness (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022). Since his first monograph, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (1995), Gordon’s many writings have challenged Sartre scholars to move beyond narrowly Euro-centric ideas of reason, humanity, and existence. The existential philosophy pioneered (...) in Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (a revision of Gordon’s 1993 Ph. D. dissertation), placed the issue of antiracism at the heart of the study of existence. A prolific and highly visible philosopher, Gordon’s writings have inspired an explosion of interest in Africana Existentialism, an open-ended, creolizing philosophy. In the interview below, Gordon outlines the existential situations that face us today. How is human liberation possible given the soul-killing forces of white supremacy, capitalism, and ongoing colonization? Gordon insists on the importance of antiracist institution building, including the transformation of white spaces, especially in academic journals, at conferences, and in university philosophy departments. Importantly, Gordon reminds us that Sartre was one of the few European writers to offer “a genuine engagement with Black intellectuals.” Like Sartre’s famous assertion that “Existentialism is a Humanism,” Gordon’s message is that Black Existentialism is a Humanism. Challenging the Euro-centric notion that human existence is an abstract, color-less category, Gordon teaches us a new way of thinking and listening. Misguided by parochial notions of human reason, many white (and/or non-Black) philosophers have closed their minds and ears to the calls of Black liberation, thinking they have nothing at stake, or that they must remain mere “allies.” Gordon’s work shows us a different path: Black liberation is a universal ethical injunction. Existential philosophy dissolves the supposed contradiction between action and theory, between universal and concrete, between ally and freedom fighter. Done properly, existential philosophy is, in Gordon’s words, “a form of epistemological decolonial practice.”. (shrink)

Europe's leading existential thinkers -- Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus -- all felt that Americans were too self-confident and shallow to accept their philosophy of responsibility, choice, and the absurd. "There is no pessimism in America regarding human nature and social organization," Sartre remarked in 1950, while Beauvoir wrote that Americans had no "feeling for sin and for remorse" and Camus derided American materialism and optimism. Existentialism, however, enjoyed rapid, widespread, and enduring popularity among Americans. (...) No less than their European counterparts, American intellectuals participated in the conversation of existentialism. In Existential America , historian George Cotkin argues that the existential approach to life, marked by vexing despair and dauntless commitment in the face of uncertainty, has deep American roots and helps to define the United States in the twentieth-century in ways that have never been fully realized or appreciated. As Cotkin shows, not only did Americans readily take to existentialism, but they were already heirs to a rich tradition of thinkers -- from Jonathan Edwards and Herman Melville to Emily Dickinson and William James -- who had wrestled with the problems of existence and the contingency of the world long before Sartre and his colleagues. After introducing this concept of an American existential tradition, Cotkin examines how formal existentialism first arrived in America in the 1930s through discussion of Kierkegaard and the early vogue among New York intellectuals for the works of Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus. Cotkin then traces the evolution of existentialism in America: its adoption by Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison to help articulate the African-American experience its expression in the works of Norman Mailer and photographer Robert Frank its incorporation into the tenets of the feminist and radical student movements of the 1960s and its lingering presence in contemporary American thought and popular culture, particularly in such films as Crimes and Misdemeanors , Fight Club and American Beauty . The only full-length study of existentialism in America, this highly engaging and original work provides an invaluable guide to the history of American culture since the end of the Second World War. (shrink)

The path taken by German philosophy in the twentieth century is one of the most exciting and controversial in the history of human thought, by turns radical and conservative and secular and religious. In this outstanding introduction, German Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: Dilthey to Honneth--the third and final volume in his trilogy, Julian Young examines the work of eight German philosophers and theologians of the period. He shows how they engaged with profound existential questions about individual (...) and collective lives, criticised the increasing rationalisation and mechanisation characteristic of modernity, and committed themselves to varying forms of liberalism, socialism and democracy. Young introduces and assesses the thought of the following figures: Wilhelm Dilthey, the encroachment of the natural sciences upon the study of humanity and his distinction between 'explanation' and 'understanding'; Karl Jaspers, existentialism, the challenge of nihilism and the turn to theology; Edith Stein, our understanding of other people and the philosophy of empathy from a phenomenological standpoint; Paul Tillich, philosophical theology and the 'theonomous' life; Martin Buber, Recovering the 'I-Thou' relationship in the face of modernity and religious socialism; Hans Jonas, responsibility, selfhood and threats to humanity in the twentieth century; Erich Fromm, the 'art of loving' as a bulwark against totalitarianism and the replacement of capitalism by communitarian socialism; Axel Honneth, contemporary Hegelianism and the ethics and politics of recognition. Lucidly and engagingly written, German Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: Dilthey to Honneth is essential reading for students of German philosophy, phenomenology and theology and will also be of interest to students in related fields such as literature, political theory and sociology. (shrink)

John Cooper and Pierre Hadot suggest that contemporary philosophy can no longer be regarded as a way of life as it has become an academic discipline of study that is theoretical and abstract. According to them, for philosophy to be considered a way of life, it has to be able to shape one’s understanding of the world, guide how one should respond from moment to moment, and reach an existential level in defining one’s being. In this article, (...) I discuss how Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist philosophy is a way of life that has been overlooked by Cooper and Hadot. I show that Sartre’s existentialism presents an interconnected perspective of human existence and human development in history, is able to guide our philosophical reasoning about our everyday decisions, and offers a practical guide to living an authentic life through assuming responsibility for our life choices and engaging with our situations. (shrink)

The proliferation of prenatal genetic testing likely to follow from advances in genetic science invites reconsideration of the moral status of abortion. In this article I examine arguments surrounding the moral status of the fetus. I conclude that secular philosophy should ultimately admit that the moral status of the fetus is uncertain, and that this uncertainty itself makes abortion morally problematic. While this does not imply that abortion is always morally wrong or that it should be legally prohibited, it (...) does recommend a presumption in favor of preserving fetal life except in special circumstances. A relevant worry is that the rise of eugenic abortion gives new force to slippery slope arguments that we will be led down a path to a situation where more fetuses are terminated for relatively trivial reasons and that this will promote other bad social consequences. This might justify legislative discouragement of certain genetic interventions. (shrink)

What has been the fate of Christianity since Nietzsche's famous announcement of the "death of God"? What is the possibility of religion, specifically Christianity, thriving in our postmodern era? In this provocative new book, Gianni Vattimo, leading Italian philosopher, politician, and framer of the European constitution, addresses these critical questions. When Vattimo was asked by a former teacher if he still believed in God, his reply was, "Well, I believe that I believe." This paradoxical declaration of faith serves as the (...) foundation for a brilliant exposition on Christianity in the new millennium -- an age characterized by a deep uncertainty of opinion -- and a personal account of how Vattimo himself recovered his faith through Nietzsche and Heidegger. He first argues that secularization is in fact the fulfillment of the central Christian message, and prepares us for a new mode of Christianity. He then explains that Nietzsche's thesis concerns only the "moral god" and leaves room for the emergence of "new gods." Third, Vattimo claims that the postmodern condition of fragmentation, anti-Eurocentrism, and postcolonialism can be usefully understood in light of Joachim of Fiore's thesis concerning the "Spiritual Age" of history. Finally, Vattimo argues for the idea of "weak thought." Because philosophy in the postmetaphysical age can only acknowledge that "all is interpretation," that the "real" is always relative and not the hard and fast "truth" we once thought it to be, contemporary thought must recognize itself and its claims as "weak" as opposed to "strong" foundationalist claims of the metaphysical past. Vattimo concludes that these factors make it possible for religion and God to become a serious topic for philosophy again, and that philosophy should now formally engage religion. (shrink)

In Postmodernity's Transcending: Devaluing God, Laurence Paul Hemming grapples with the philosophical weakness that characterizes postmodern theory, its privileging of the visual, and its reductive description of the self. He offers a profound challenge to many theologians and philosophers currently articulating questions concerning God, value, and the supposed "nihilism" of the postmodern situation. He does this by examining the origin and trajectory of the aesthetic sublime, beloved of postmodern theologians, philosophers, and theorists of art. Hemming's work undertakes on one (...) hand a history of the concept of the sublime; on the other, it explores the limits of theological thinking, where theology is understood either as a practice arising from faith or from thinking alone. By examining concepts like soul, experience, analogy, and truth, Hemming provokes contemporary Christian theology to a more serious engagement with philosophy. Hemming gives an authoritative genealogy of the predominance of the visual, beginning with the Presocratics and ending in the present. He examines the confrontation with God and the gods to be found in Protagoras, Longinus, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Zizek, and Derrida, and, in the process, offers innovative readings of these thinkers. A highly original study, Postmodernity's Transcending: Devaluing God will stimulate considerable discussion about postmodernity, representation, and subjectivity and, in particular, philosophical and theological discussions of the sublime and transcendence. -/- Introduction -- Postmodernity's transcending -- Rhetor and rhetoric -- The truth of sublimity -- The soul of sublimity -- Analogia entis -- Counting up to one is sublime -- Negating sublimity -- Devaluing God -- Transcending postmodernity -- Conclusion. (shrink)

The readings have been assembled with the specific intention of providing people in education with opportunities for first-hand encounters with men exploring facets of existence that concern those with responsibilities in the transformed world. The chapters will permit him to confront some of his own uncertainties; they will stir him to evaluate his commitments, and provide an introduction to a philosophic stance which has aroused interest among teacher: the diverse strains of thinking identified as existentialism. The selections are all pre-occupied (...) with 'education' in its inclussive sense: education as it refers to the multiple modes of becoming, of congronting life situations, of engaging with other. of struggling to be. (shrink)

If religion once seemed to have played out its role in the intellectual and political history of Western secular modernity, it has now returned with a vengeance. In this engaging study, Hent de Vries argues that a turn to religion discernible in recent philosophy anticipates and accompanies this development in the contemporary world. Though the book reaches back to Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger, and earlier, it takes its inspiration from the tradition of French phenomenology, notably Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Marion, (...) and, especially, Jacques Derrida. Tracing how Derrida probes the discourse on religion, its metaphysical presuppositions, and its transformations, de Vries shows how this author consistently foregrounds the unexpected alliances between a radical interrogation of the history of Western philosophy and the religious inheritance from which that philosophy has increasingly sought to set itself apart. De Vries goes beyond formal analogies between the textual practices of deconstruction and so-called negative theology to address the necessity for a philosophical thinking that situates itself at once close to and at the farthest remove from traditional manifestations of the religious and the theological. This paradox is captured in the phrase adieu ( à dieu ), borrowed from Levinas, which signals at once a turn toward and a leave-taking from God -- and which also gestures toward and departs from the other of this divine other, the possibility of radical evil. Only by confronting such uncanny and difficult figures, de Vries claims, can one begin to think and act upon the ethical and political imperatives of our day. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:AMERICAN OATHOLlC THEOLOGY AT CENTURY'S END: POS'I100NCIL!IAR, POSTMODERN, POST...THOMISTIC * J. A. D1No1A, O.P. Domiinican House of Studies Washiington, D.O. I N CENTURY'S END-.a iascinaiting recent hook describing the decades at the turn of the centuries from the 990s throiUgh the 1990s-cultural historian Hillel Schwartz writes: "The millennial year ~000 has gravitamona1l tides of maximal reach. Its entire precedirng hundred years, our century, has come to he felt as (...) a final epoch, a time of grotesque·extremity...." 1 Along with other modern intellectual inquiries, American Catholic theology has felt the pull of the app :voaching miHenium. Any interpretation of its current stateas well as of the 'l:"ole that the ·thought of St. Thomas Aquinas may continue to play in it--'ll.eeds to take account of long range intellectual and theological trends. Clearly, the main currents in fate 20th century American Catholic theology result at least in part from the play of large tides reaching over the past hundred years and hey;ond. Among the most significant of these is Ohrist]anity's continuing endeavor to meet the pl'leS'sing surge of modernity. This endeavor engaged the energies of Catholics and Protestants for nearly two centuries, :before reaching 1someth:ing orf a climax in the Second Vatican C01Uncil. Assimilating the 1Work of several *A version of this paper was presented on May 4, 1990 in Rome at an Angelicum University symposium on the role of St. Thomas in contemporary thought. 1.Hillel.Schwartz, Oentury's End: A Oultural History of the Fiin de Siecle from the 990s through the 1990s (New York: Doubleday, 1990), p. 239. 499 500 J. A. DI NOIA1 O.P. generrutions of,bishops and theologians, the Council oombined a reaffirmation of the Catholic Christian identity of the Church with a positive, a:lbeit critical, approach to modernity. Now, just when disagreements about the conciliar stance to modernity preoccupy and divide eurrent American Catholic theologians, the advent of " :postmodernity " is being hailed in a1,chitecbure, literary oriticism, science, philosophy, and other fields. No wonder the decades ushering in the 21st century have seemed to many "a final epoch, a time of grotesque extremity " in theology an:d in Church life. The condition of late 20th century American theology is intelligible, I shall af'gue here, only when viewed in the perspective of the complex responses of Catholic and Protestant Christianity to the once swelling and now receding tides of modernity. The fortunes of the study of Aquinas ha,V'e shifted in tandem with these :fluctuations. In both Aquinas's late 19th century 11evival and, at least in American CathoJic circles, his late 20th century eclipse, alternative Christian assessments of the challenge of moderniity figured prominently. But the situation is again in flux. There is a recovery of Aquinas underway, in connection with theological developments that encompass at least a measure of the refreshing postmodern agenda. It is here, I shall suggest, that we can identify some of the most creative currents at work in present-day American theology. I Although united in their appeal to the authority of Vatican II, rival American Catholic theological positions are divided by two opposed readings of the nature of the conciliar response to modernity and its implioataions for the theo1ogica:l a:genida. Acco1 •ding to one reading, the Coundl is understood to commend,a strong reaffirmation o.f Catho·lic Christian identity, taking the broadest view of its historic traditions, yet open to the cultural and religious pluralism characteristic of our times. But in the eyes of a numerous and influential group of American theologians, such a reading reverses the true priorities of AMERICAN CATHOLIC THEOLOGY 501 the Council. It was not resfomtion, ibut modernization, dialogue, a.nd social oommitment that V:atican IT chiefly sought to culti¥ate in the contemporary Church. To a. large extent, the state of theology in the U.S. (and perhaps elsewhere as well) refLects the predominance of the second interpreta.tion of the Council. Ressourcement or aggiornamento? As the conciliar documents reveal, both of these progmms were ruddressed and embraced by Viatican II. But which of them has priority? The documents themselrves... (shrink)

Rather than adopting a view of Fichte as a “proto-existentialist,” as some scholars have suggested, I instead aim to develop an account which articulates a fundamental existential structure which helps to elucidate and situate later notions of existential subjectivity by accounting for its condition of possibility. In this vein, existentialism not only articulates a certain kind of being in the world but a logical condition of the structure of subjectivity itself. I call this structuring condition existential logic, (...) and locate it in Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre. I develop the term existential logic instead of merely attributing to Fichte the term existential-ism or existentialist, insofar as I aim to locate an operative structure within the being who then becomes an existential subject for whom existential engagement is only then possible. The term existential logic suggests that the striving of the self both with and against the world—as existential phenomenology would have it—is a structure inherent within Fichte's logical deduction and formulation of the Absolute I. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 493 an improvement over what is available. In this way the English reader unable to go to the Spanish originals could benefit greatly. ANTON DONOSO University of Detroit Das Verhdltnis von Philosophie und Theologie im Denken Martin Heideggers. By Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert. Symposium, no. 47. (Freiburg/Miinchen: Karl Alber, 1974. Pp. 340) Sie'fert deals competently not only with Heidegger's own views on the relation between philosophy and theology (...) but with the response they found among philosophers and theologians. From the beginning Heidegger has insisted on the difference in experience at the root of philosophy and theology. This remains true even after the "turn" when Heidegger has much to say about God or gods. At the time when Sein und Zeit appeared Heidegger gave a lecture entitled Phenomenology and Theology, which was published only in 1970.1 He claimed that theology as positive science is not independent from philosophy. What does this mean? A few quotations from the lecture may clarify his viewpoint and show how theological concepts are related to the ontological understanding of secular human existence. "The factual matter [das Vorliegende] (Positum) for theology is its being Christian.... Christian we call faith.... Christ, the crucified God, is for the 'Christian' faith the being that is manifest primarily in faith.... -2 Thus Heidegger holds that "theology itself is primarily founded on faith. ''3 Furthermore, faith as regeneration of the soul transcends the non-Christian existence.4 This means that the believer finds himself in an existential situation in which he cannot avoid taking into consideration the pretheological existence. Therefore, Heidegger says that "in the Christian event as regeneration.., the prebelieving that is disbelieving of Dasein is surpassed. Surpassed does not mean disposed of but lifted on to the new creation and kept and preserved by it. ''~ Thus Heidegger maintains that the concept of "sin as the counterphenomenon to faith as regeneration.., can only be made clear in its meaning by the concept of guilt as an existential of Dasein. ''6 Both the publication of Sein und Zeit and the lecture Phenomenology and Theology belong to the period when Heidegger was a professor at Marburg University and in close contact with R. Bultmann. The historical-temporal structure of Dasein together with the hermeneutic circle, as these terms were developed in Sein und Zeit, became the pivotal issues of Bultmann's theology. Bultmann justifies his reliance on Heidegger (according to a quotation by Siefert, p. 146), claiming that theology as a positive science deals with a specific being (Seiendes) and presupposes a sense of Being that it takes from philosophy. The much-discussed result of Heidegger's influence on Bultmann is his demythologizing of Scripture. Biblical myths, Bultmann argues, are based on a cosmology that, because it belongs to a prescientific age, can no longer be taken for granted by modern man. 7He further agrees with Heidegger that faith is the quality that identifies a Christian. Only "the man of faith" will "hear" the message contained in the Bible. Moreover, faith as regeneration has a temporal character insofar as it liberates the person from his sinful past and directs him to the "new" man in the future. Because of Bultmann's emphasis on faith some critics have reproached him for neglecting Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann. 2Ibid., p. 18. Translations in this review are my own. Ibid., p. 27. 4Ibid., p. 29. Ibid. 6Ibid., p. 30. 7See Kerygma and Myth, ed. H. W. Bartsch (New York: Harper and Row, 1961), p. 3. 494 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY divine grace. In her critique Siefert joins these critics in arguing that Bultmann gains his theological concepts not through being open to the substance of existential structures of Dasein as a matter of principle but on the ground of faith (p. 153). G. Noller, a theologian educated at Tiabingen University, rejects Bultmann's theology and starts with Heidegger's concept of Being. Siefert argues that Noller "misinterprets Heidegger in that he defines God as a being (Seiendes) and falls back into a metaphysical position (p. 157). In Sein und Existenz, says Siefert, Noller states that "God is the destiny (Schickung) of Being, but Being qua nothing may negate God and usher in... (shrink)

An examination of Jewish philosophy in the modern age and in light of secular philosophy. Ch. 8 (pp. 189-211), "Fackenheim's Dilemma, " deals with Emil Fackenheim's philosophy concerning the Holocaust, and the place of God and Judaism in a post-Holocaust world. Expounds on his theology, his existential theories, and his attitude to Jewish history.

ABSTRACTThis article discusses the turn to polytheism in postmodern theory. In postmodernism, there is a strong interest in polytheism as an alternative to the much-criticized dominance of onto-theology in the philosophical tradition. The article argues that the new polytheism cannot be unequivocally understood as an alternative for an onto-theological way of thinking, or as a ‘liberation’ from monotheism. Already in Romanticism, the engagement with polytheism and paganism was ambiguous. There was the familiar superiority of Christian monotheism over polytheism. But there (...) was also an appropriation of polytheism that served a new self-perception of the West. This article focuses on this second line of interpretation and argues that postmodern theory inherits the theo-political concerns central to eighteenth- and nineteenth- century Romanticism. The article sets out to sketch the role of polytheism in a post-secular paradigm. Subsequently, it sketches the engagement with polytheism in British and German Romanticism. It will be argued that in Romanticism, polytheism was always embedded in more substantial cultural and political narratives. The remainder of the article will scrutinize the function of polytheism in the writings of Richard Rorty and John Milbank and how their respective forms of polytheism give way to different political theologies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Asura’s Harp: Engagement with Language as Buddhist PathKenneth K. TanakaAsura’s Harp: Engagement with Language as Buddhist Path. By Dennis Hirota. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 2006. 156 pp.In Asura’s Harp, Hirota focuses on the Pure Land Buddhist thought of Shinran (1173–1263), the founder of Jōdo Shinshō school and one of the major figures of Japanese Buddhism. I believe Hirota’s main argument of the book is succinctly expressed on its back cover (...) blurb: “Unlike monastic traditions that seek the eradication of delusional attachments through transcendence of ordinary thought and speech, Shinran teaches that human existence is inevitably characterized by linguisticality and that the genuinely practicable path to realization lies in engagement with language.” For Hirota, language plays a central role in the religious transformative experience called Shinjin, considered a genuine awareness of the self and the world. This way of understanding religious language goes against the dominant view, especially that of Zen with its proverbial “beyond words” approach 1 and contemporary Buddhist discussions on language as being limited and even false.In the prologue of the book, Hirota points out the growing convergence in the Buddhist outlook and the current interest in Western thought. Both traditions see that “persons are not autonomous agents making judgments and initiating actions independently of others, their past, and their location in society and history” (p. 2). Instead, humans are now seen to be situated in particular temporal and spatial circumstances, with its attendant limitations, prejudices, and finitude. In terms of language, this realization has led to a shift in Western thought from metaphysical to hermeneutical concerns, thus resonating with Buddhism’s view of ordinary language [End Page 182] as “inevitably warped by attachments and informed by falsely reifying conceptualization” (p. 2).At the same time both traditions recognize the adaptive use of language, as seen especially in the Buddhist conception of “skillful means,” to provide guidance to self-realization and awareness. This, Hirota believes, offers an opportunity for a dialogue between contemporary Western thought and Buddhism.With this as the backdrop, Hirota sets out to clarify the nature and significance of language in Shin Pure Land thought with an intent to contribute to this broader discussion of religious language across religious and cultural boundaries, a formidable task for any scholar. However, there is no one, in my opinion, more qualified to carry out this task than Hirota, for he served as the chief translator of the twenty-year project that culminated in the Collected Works of Shinran (CWS)2 and has been publishing insightful and provocative writings in the study of language from Shin Buddhist perspective in both English and Japanese.3 There are very few, if any, scholars in Japan dealing with this subject with the ability to talk about it in a cross-religious and disciplinary context. In more recent years, he has taken his findings to gatherings outside Japan, particularly to Europe. In fact, this book is, in large part, an outcome of the talks he delivered several years ago in the Fürst Franz-Josef and Fürstin Gina Memorial Philosophy Lecture Series at the Internationale Akademie für Philosophie in Liechtenstein.Before I focus in on some of the central points in this book, it would be helpful to get a bird’s eye view of this book, Asura’s Harp by listing the chapter titles. The book comprises four parts: “Buddhist View of Language,” “Engagement with the Pure Land Teaching,” “Truth as Transformative Event,” and “Language and Religious Awareness.” Part 1 contains three chapters: “Shinran’s Buddhist Critique of Language,” “Reality as Language,” and “The Dialogical Structure of True Language.” Part 2 also includes three chapters: “Modes of Engagement with the Teaching,” “The Encounter with Truth,” and “The Context of Encounter.” Part 3 contains two chapters: “Shinran Face to Face” and “Hearing the Vow.” In part 4, we find two chapters: “Language and Realization of Shinjin” and “Living from the Name of Buddha.” The postscript, “Shinran and Hermeneutical Thought,” is a helpful aid in getting a little more insight into Hirota’s view on language.As is evident by the chapter titles, there is much to comprehend and digest, particularly... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 17.1 (2003) 73-75 [Access article in PDF] Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics. Sonia Kruks. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001. Pp. xii + 200. $35.00 h.c. 0-8014-3387-8; $16.95 pbk. 0-8014-8417-0. Sonia Kruks' latest book, Retrieving Experience, is a valuable contribution to ongoing debates about the relevance of feminist philosophy in a period of relative political quietism. It also (...) offers timely reminders of historical continuities between phenomenological and postmodern conceptions of subjectivity and political engagement. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, Fanon, and the later Sartre, Kruks proposes to "explore women's embodied experiences" and to "ask whether they might not offer some means to help build affective bonds among women who are in many ways radically different from one another" (6). The book approaches this task by means of two secondary issues. First, should feminist thought be oriented by phenomenological or postmodernist theoretical strategies? Second, can women's embodied experience be the conceptual basis for political and epistemological practices that avoid the pitfalls of "identity politics" or an "epistemology of provenance"? The answer to both questions comes through the notion of praxis developed in Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason. By thinking of embodiment as praxis or work, a strategy implicit in Beauvoir's idea that "one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." Kruks seeks to resolve the ethical affront of finding one's individuality reduced to the "generality" of a collective—the ethical affront to which feminists of various generations and theoretical persuasions must respond.Retrieving Experience explores the significance of recognition as a political norm. Identifying Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew as a pivotal work in the history of identitarian theorizing, she situates recent appeals for race- and gender-based political mobilization in the United States with respect to the dialectical relationship between the Look, shame, and recognition existentialists observed in situations of anti-Semitic and colonial domination during and immediately after the Second World War. Legitimating knowledge gained under oppressive conditions formed an important element of African, Southeast Asian, and ultimately African-American and feminist resistance to cultural imperialism. However, Kruks warns, discourses of "recognition" risk placing the blame for group domination on individuals' face-to-face interactions while concealing the role of state and economic institutions in enabling social disdain to systematically damage a group's quality of life. Moreover, they suggest that the experience of subjugation alone justifies knowledge claims or counts, without further elaboration, as an act of political engagement. Kruks argues that knowers and actors need to identify conceptual and practical mediations enabling individual interactions, experiences, and strategies to prompt the recognition and transformation of [End Page 73] group situations. Sartre's notion of praxis, she suggests, explains how an individual can participate in a collectivity while acting autonomously or acquiescing to subjection.The most important passages in Retrieving Experience examine the affective aspects of the decision to take up a political identity or engage in political action. Going beyond Sartre's account of mediations, Kruks suggests that the sensory and emotional qualities of embodiment are themselves mediators, the products of praxis as well as its vehicles. Since any act of social knowledge involves the emotions, affect plays an important role in the process whereby individuals from different cultural, economic, and bodily situations learn about and shape one another's' environment through the act of knowledge. Individuals, then, may have a moral responsibility to learn about others in a way that gives them "sympathetic bodies." Drawing on Maria Lugones' social epistemology, Kruks argues that "world-traveling" or existing simultaneously in several communities or sets of power relations is a bodily act, but also a fully cultural, ethical act rather than a natural way of being. One is not born, but becomes, an embodied knower. Understanding female embodiment as a kind of work or "world-traveling" praxis enables feminist solidarity—"respectful recognition" to replace a historically implausible "sisterhood" or a distinct epistemological perspective as a regulative ideal for feminist politics.But how far can the... (shrink)

As philosophers in the continental tradition have taken an interest in the return of religion, anthropologists and sociologists have rejected the once-dominant secularization thesis. Bradley B. Onishi connects these lines of thought to reveal how philosophy's religious investigations have enabled critical reflections on the category of the secular.

Colby Dickinson proposes a new political theology rooted in the intersections between continental philosophy, heterodox theology, and orthodox theology. Moving beyond the idea that there is an irresolvable tension at the heart of theological discourse, the conflict between the two poles of theology is made intelligible. Dickinson discusses the opposing poles simply as manifestations of reform and revolution, characteristics intrinsic to the nature of theological discourse itself. Outlining the illuminating space of theology, Theological Poverty in Continental Philosophy breaks (...) new ground for critical theology and continental philosophy. Within the theology of poverty, the believer renounces the worldly for the divine. Through this focus on the poverty intrinsic to religious calling, the potential for cross-pollination between the theological and the secular is highlighted. Ultimately situating the virtue of theological poverty within a poststructuralist, postmodern world, Dickinson is not content to position Christian philosophy as the superior theological position, moving away from the absolute values of one tradition over another. This universalising of theological poverty through core and uniting concepts like grace, negation, violence and paradox reveal the theory's transmutable strength. By joining up critical theology and the philosophy of religion in this way, the book broadens the possibility of a critical dialogue both between and within disciplines. (shrink)

This essay seeks to scrutinize Kierkegaard’s critical philosophical theology. The intent is to demonstrate how his religious thought, especially on God’s relation to the world and to the human being, can contribute to generating a cogent response to the challenges presented by our accelerating secular world. Apart from the narrative on the Dane’s passionate reflections, I employ two other narratives to facilitate this inquiry into Kierkegaard. The first of these facilitating narratives comes from highlighting the work on the concept of (...) resonance by the social theorist Hartmut Rosa. Rosa’s rich analysis of our contemporary situation provides a persuasive case for the accelerating pace of our secular world, the complex dynamics of alienation that are at play within it, and the need for social transformation that creates space for increasing resonance within personal and social relationships and structures. The second facilitating narrative centers on the notion of dancing in God, which I believe holds promise for effectively communicating moving, bodily, rhythmic, passionate, and responsive thoughts and actions concerning God’s engagement in our contemporary world. I hope to show that these three complementary discourses together provide a provocative religious discourse and vision that can prove helpful in addressing many of the challenges of our time. (shrink)

What has been the fate of Christianity since Nietzsche's famous announcement of the "death of God"? What is the possibility of religion, specifically Christianity, thriving in our postmodern era? In this provocative new book, Gianni Vattimo, leading Italian philosopher, politician, and framer of the European constitution, addresses these critical questions. When Vattimo was asked by a former teacher if he still believed in God, his reply was, "Well, I believe that I believe." This paradoxical declaration of faith serves as the (...) foundation for a brilliant exposition on Christianity in the new millennium -- an age characterized by a deep uncertainty of opinion -- and a personal account of how Vattimo himself recovered his faith through Nietzsche and Heidegger. He first argues that secularization is in fact the fulfillment of the central Christian message, and prepares us for a new mode of Christianity. He then explains that Nietzsche's thesis concerns only the "moral god" and leaves room for the emergence of "new gods." Third, Vattimo claims that the postmodern condition of fragmentation, anti-Eurocentrism, and postcolonialism can be usefully understood in light of Joachim of Fiore's thesis concerning the "Spiritual Age" of history. Finally, Vattimo argues for the idea of "weak thought." Because philosophy in the postmetaphysical age can only acknowledge that "all is interpretation," that the "real" is always relative and not the hard and fast "truth" we once thought it to be, contemporary thought must recognize itself and its claims as "weak" as opposed to "strong" foundationalist claims of the metaphysical past. Vattimo concludes that these factors make it possible for religion and God to become a serious topic for philosophy again, and that philosophy should now formally engage religion. (shrink)

Philosophy today is undergoing a transformation away from modernism. The problem is that it is far from clear what this transformation is moving toward. I examine the transition from the premodern to the modern philosophical world and contrast it with our current situation. While the moderns were clear in their rejection of Aristotelian scholasticism and sure of their methods, in our own time we are neither clear about the extent to which we reject modernism nor our methodology moving forward. (...) I argue that the uncertainty of the postmodern philosophical world is, in an important sense, a necessary consequence of the rejection of modernism itself. (shrink)

What has been the fate of Christianity since Nietzsche's famous announcement of the "death of God"? What is the possibility of religion, specifically Christianity, thriving in our postmodern era? In this provocative new book, Gianni Vattimo, leading Italian philosopher, politician, and framer of the European constitution, addresses these critical questions. When Vattimo was asked by a former teacher if he still believed in God, his reply was, "Well, I believe that I believe." This paradoxical declaration of faith serves as the (...) foundation for a brilliant exposition on Christianity in the new millennium--an age characterized by a deep uncertainty of opinion--and a personal account of how Vattimo himself recovered his faith through Nietzsche and Heidegger. He first argues that secularization is in fact the fulfillment of the central Christian message, and prepares us for a new mode of Christianity. He then explains that Nietzsche's thesis concerns only the "moral god" and leaves room for the emergence of "new gods." Third, Vattimo claims that the postmodern condition of fragmentation, anti-Eurocentrism, and postcolonialism can be usefully understood in light of Joachim of Fiore's thesis concerning the "Spiritual Age" of history. Finally, Vattimo argues for the idea of "weak thought." Because philosophy in the postmetaphysical age can only acknowledge that "all is interpretation," that the "real" is always relative and not the hard and fast "truth" we once thought it to be, contemporary thought must recognize itself and its claims as "weak" as opposed to "strong" foundationalist claims of the metaphysical past. Vattimo concludes that these factors make it possible for religion and God to become a serious topic for philosophy again, and that philosophy should now formally engage religion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Translation of Levinas’s Review of Lev Shestov’s Kierkegaard and the Existential PhilosophyJames McLachlan (bio)In 1937, Emmanuel Levinas published a review of Lev Shestov’s Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy.1 In one of the first studies in English on Levinas, Edith Wyschogrod claims: “What Levinas writes of Shestov’s analysis of Kierkegaard might well be taken as a program for his own future work.”2 The review of Shestov’s Kierkegaard (...) book shows Levinas sympathy with Shestov’s rebellion against rationalism and totalism, his complaint that the individual and all her concerns, desires, and suffering were crushed by the world and ignored by philosophy. But his review of Shestov’s book also shows Levinas’s concern the rebellion could end in “the vanity of personal protest” and substitute subjective imprisonment for the imprisonment of history.3 Such irrationalism could lead to its own forms of violence, which in 1937 were becoming apparent.Like Levinas, Shestov helped introduce Husserl in France, although in Shestov’s case as an adversary to Husserl with whom he developed a friendship.4 The exchange between Shestov and Levinas’s Strasbourg teacher Jean Hering helped publicize Husserl in France.5 As an [End Page 237] exile in Europe, Shestov published his most powerful works Potestas Clavium, In Job’s Balances, Athens and Jerusalem, and Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy. Shestov sought, through a continued hammering, to escape the trap of Being toward radical freedom.6 The form of Shestov’s escape attempt can be situated between Levinas and Kierkegaard. He shares with Levinas the desire to escape ontology but, like Kierkegaard, Shestov’s version of the escape is into a radically individual relation with God through a violent repudiation of the universal; thus, both Levinas’s disagreement with and attraction to Shestov in his 1937 review of Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy prefigure his rejection of Kierkegaard.One must be wary of reading Shestov as a kind of introduction to any thinker he engages, and thus the inclusion for many years of Shestov’s book on short bibliographies on Kierkegaard was extremely misleading. The book was quite influential when it appeared in 1936 around the same time as Jean Wahl’s Études Kierkegaardiennes. Shestov’s work is filled with hyperbole, exaggeration, and polemic. All of his writings are more literary essays than works of scholarship. And it is this mesmerizing writing that Russian literary critic D. S. Mirsky called “the tidiest, the most elegant, the most concentrated... in short, the most classical prose in the whole of modern Russian Literature.”7 A more perceptive reader than many Kierkegaardians who have read Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy, Levinas wrote in 1937 that “the philosophical project of M. Shestov often takes on the allure of brilliant literary essay. It is a ‘poem’ rather than a ‘work.’ The author is more present therein than his subject.”8Here Levinas notes several important points about Shestov’s Kierkegaard book. Perhaps the most important is that it is not primarily about Kierkegaard that “the author is more present therein than his subject.” Levinas sees Shestov had indeed seized on one of the central aspects of Kierkegaard’s thought but “what affects us more deeply still, and this is not its smallest attraction, the ideas of M. Shestov.”9 This is true of all of Shestov’s work. It is a “vast symposium” around the problems that agitated Shestov. [End Page 238]________Emmanuel Levinas, review of Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy (Vox clamantis in deserto), by Leon Chestov, trans. T. Rageot and B. de Schloezer, Revue des Études Juives 101, nos. 1–2 (1937): 139–41.The thought of Søren Kierkegaard, Danish philosopher, dead in 1855, has known for some time a rare good fortune. Jaspers and Heidegger in German, Jean Wahl and Gabriel Marcel in France, are some of the names that permit us to measure the quality of the influence, which, in a very solid manner, he has also exercised on the only modern philosopher of Judaism worthy of the name, Franz Rosenzweig. This good fortune is not just a mode. The moral crisis opened by the War of 1914 has given men a... (shrink)

In recent years, Richard Kearney has emerged as a leading figure in the field of continental philosophy, widely recognized for his work in the areas of philosophical and religious hermeneutics, theory and practice of the imagination, and political thought. This much-anticipated--and long overdue--study is the first to reflect the full range and impact of Kearney's extensive contributions to contemporary philosophy. The book opens with Kearney's own "prelude" in which he traces his intellectual itinerary as it traverses the three (...) imaginaries explored in the volume: the dialogical, the political, and the narrative. The interviews that follow the first section allow readers to listen in on conversations between Kearney and some of the most interesting and respected thinkers of our time--Noam Chomsky, Charles Taylor, Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricouer, and Martha Nussbaum--as they reveal new and unexpected aspects of their thought on stories and mourning, ethics and narrative, terror and religion, intellectuals and ideology. The next section, on the political imaginary, looks at Kearney's distinctive contribution to the political situation in Ireland and in Europe more generally; and in the last, on narrative, writers including David Wood, Terry Eagleton, and Mark Dooley focus on Kearney's novels as instances of narrative theory put into literary practice. Concluding with Kearney's postscript, an essay on "Traversals and Epiphanies in Joyce and Proust," the volume comes full circle, encompassing the full extent of Richard Kearney's engagement and offerings as a philosopher. (shrink)

Postmodern theory is used to consider literacy instruction with and without an electronic whiteboard to investigate what it means to move beyond using technology to replicate older models of classroom structure that may be historically situated but that also limit or at least, do not support engagement in ways that may be possible through use of new technologies. Using postmodern theory in this regard is a way in which to consider again the thoughts and practices that tend to construct identities (...) and ideologies in ways that work against true engagement in literacy tasks, lead to subjection and demonstration of acquiescence in place of engagement that leads to participation and critical engagement. Critical engagement as opposed to gaining and maintaining student attention to task are considered in this paper. Thinking about use of the electronic whiteboard from a postmodern perspective cautions us about careful use of this technology to avoid sending messages to students about them and their role in literacy development, the classroom, and in society. (shrink)

In existential thought the thinking subject includes itself in its own thinking; this subject is not conceived as a substance that may be objectively determined, for its being lies in a making or constituting itself. Choice is thus the crucial concept of existential thought. Since choice involves awareness of the uncertainty of itspossible outcomes, anguish is inherent in it. Hence anguish in the face of our own freedom is essential to the human reality, and authenticity lies in facing (...) anguish rather than fleeing it. The term metaexistential refers, (1) to those systems that acknowledge absolute authenticity and truth to consist in going beyond existence in all its manifestations—those which are more unauthentic and less conflictive and distressful, as well as those which are less unauthentic and more conflictive and distressful—and (2) to those Paths of Awakening possessing the means for effectively going beyond existence and thus achieving absolute authenticity and truth. In fact, (1) only the Contemplation state of higher bodhisattvas and the state of Buddhahood, which are free from the subject-objectduality and thus beyond the bounds of existence and of the human reality, constitute a genuine surpassing of alienation and delusion, and hence only these conditions are true to our innermost nature; and (2) only a really effective practice of metaexistential methods such as Buddhist Paths can be conducive to these realizations. (shrink)

The paper critically engages with Simone de Beauvoir’s promising claim that reproductive technology is the emancipatory tool for women and the Indian problem of surrogacy. Beauvoir believes in voluntary motherhood in which reproductive technologies play a significant role in empowering women. Although in India, surrogacy is seen as a choice-based job, surrogate mothers are subjected to exploitation, commodification, poor living conditions, and unethical treatment. I argue that Beauvoir’s description of technology and motherhood needs further revision in today’s world where surrogacy (...) is not only disempowering women but also crushing their maternal self by viewing them merely as machines for fulfilling societal values. Recently, the Indian government has taken strong majors to regularise surrogacy will be further explored. In doing so, an attempt will be made to critically analyse the meanings of women’s choices in relation to the use of reproductive technologies within the existentialist framework of Beauvoir. (shrink)

1施莱尔玛赫 contribution to the development施莱尔玛赫for hermeneutics in the development of Historically hermeneutics In order to make a decisive turn when he made ​​the future "general hermeneutics" , hermeneutics will be applied to all text interpretation. When the traditional hermeneutics contains In order to understand, description and application,施莱尔玛赫the attention is hermeneutics as "the art of understanding." 施莱尔玛赫also introduced the interpretation of psychology, can penetrate the text by means of its author's individuality and flexibility soul. He wanted to become a systematic hermeneutics, (...) and criticism of previous hermeneutics is "the rules of the merger," and the lack of coherence. Wu Ning speaking, they deal with different issues is a combination of methods. 施莱尔玛赫hermeneutics points to avoid misunderstanding of the text. This part is up to the final discussion of施莱尔玛赫criticism of the United States. 2. Dilthey contribution to the philosophical hermeneutics of Dilthey on施莱尔玛赫In order to write the thesis, including In order to Protestant hermeneutics history, from the Reformation to the future as a second reference books. He was a learned scholar and has been on many topics regardless above. For our purposes, Dilthey is a philosopher with a passion for life, he was placed In order to humanities and social sciences and natural sciences in an established full equality of points, by the foundation on the hermeneutics In order to develop a basic methodology. But in the science competition, he was seeking "Allgemeingultigkeit", a universal validity, to do so In order to give him too much towards the foundation to the scientific methods of thought. He is still a major development of the character of philosophical hermeneutics. 3 Heidegger before and on philosophical hermeneutics, "and there is time" contribution to the development of philosophical hermeneutics is the decisive shift in Heidegger, born with the future, there are original philosopher The early works. He Freiburg Hu plugs Seoul assistant, and in the phenomenological Hu stopper Seoul In order to create a useful set up beyond the traditional methods of philosophy, but he is still too dependent on science Hu stopper Marco effectiveness. Part I: description of the evolution of the early Heidegger: "ontology - the fact of hermeneutics," the book published after the death of Heidegger was published in 1999, English translation, Heidegger in this series by the fact that the ontology of hermeneutics In order to give us a hermeneutic understanding of his meaning. In order to avoid the traditional hermeneutics of his meaning, In order to return to the ancient hope臘hermeneueinc and hermeneia idiom. He attempts to go beyond the limits of contemporary objects, through the period of return to the ancient hope臘general language idioms. Hermeneutic encounter with the interpretation of Homer's description of the mouth, publish, translate and interpret. His description of historical hermeneutics in the pull-down maps and sub ​​Lane Park after a groundbreaking Aristotle hope臘idioms in the loss of richness and decline. But the hermeneutics of Heidegger speaking the method is close to something, such as early speech hermeneutics In order to approach closer to the truth of it is understandable the former interpretation of this domain as there face life. For this last hermeneutics as the method of self-understanding, but in a letter to his students Engelbert Kerbs letter, Heidegger also emphasizes the history In order to recognize the character. Us from our understanding of historical context, our understanding of the structure is formed by shaping the concept of history and even our language. In Dilthey's hermeneutics, he also stressed that understanding the historical basis. From Dilthey to Heidegger this view. Heidegger in his speech defines hermeneutics as "the fact of participation, close, and descriptions of the same interrogation methods." Hermeneutics is the interpretation of not only understanding knowledge as a negative process, but active participation, interrogation and close. Fact of itself is interpreted, it is through understanding the questions and answers something. Heidegger back to the necessary conditions for our understanding of factors, understanding of "the former structure." He describes some part of the former, is awareness and understanding of nature, we understand something "to" something, and we understand it in a specific historical context. Further more, we expect to understand it in the presence of a sight, not a determining sexual arousal by the sight, by the basic problems of the future horizon, it is "the possibility of there," the sight, for there is a special special possible time horizon. These early works of Heidegger has been found there the possibility of meaning. We all都leadership to a new concept of the humanities. In addition, as a rational animal, as Aristotle said sub-Lane, who is of a future there may not be included, including the timing of there. People are looking to understand their own there. Instructions to Heidegger, hermeneutics offers a new concept for the person's point of view. Part II: there and time hermeneutics is first mentioned in the "there and the time," Section VII, Heidegger phenomenology has been interpreted as if it is. In order that he found "the meaning of phenomenological description as a way to rely on hermeneutics, phenomenology of this and some of the logos have hermeneuein the characteristics of this phenomenology is to use some basic meaning of the word hermeneutics, it indicates the work In order to interpret . "In the second sense, Heidegger found in hermeneutics裡are there for the meaning of this method of exposing the shield. The third meaning is the interpretation of this promising continuous manner so that its future is possible, it's future there. Section 31 of hermeneutics is important, because there is some understanding that is. Understanding the process is the center of human existence, in Section 32 entitled "interpretation and understanding," understanding the interpretation built on. Visit the world around it and understand things as this or that, always never as pure consciousness. As Heidegger said, "always had to watch as the ability to understand and interpret", in other words, there is no precedence in the interpretation of pure consciousness, there is always ask questions and interpretation of the visual field. Section 44, regardless Heidegger also true about management, in its modern form as a true statement, is always carried a deeper understanding and interpretation of the export process. But the really right is defined as the management there has been an associate of knot, so it access to basic ontology of sight. It is obvious that there's open, this hole is to guide him toward the police point of view of the artistic part of the next lecture will be discussed. This lecture primarily presents the two early works of Heidegger in which hermeneutics plays a definitive role. As background, the contributions of Schleiermacher and Dilthey are presented briefly before going into Heidegger's contribution. Ⅰ. Schleiermacher's Contribution to the Development of a Philosophical Hermeneutics Schleiermacher made a decisive turn in the history of hermeneutics when he proposed a "Universal Hermeneutics," a hermeneutics that would apply to all kinds of text interpretation. While traditional hermeneutics included moments of understanding, explication and application, Schleiermacher focused on hermeneutics as the "art of understanding . "Schleiermacher also introduced psychological interpretation whereby one tried to penetrate the individuality and soul of the author of a text. He wanted hermeneutics to be systematic, and he criticized previous hermeneutics for being only an" amalgam of rules "and lacking systematic coherence. Rather , they were methods for dealing with an array of different kinds of problems. Schleiermacher's hermeneutics was directed at avoiding misunderstanding of the text. At the end of this section Gadamer's criticisms of Schleiermacher will be discussed. Ⅱ. Dilthey's Contribution to Philosophical Hermeneutics Dilthey wrote his dissertation on Schleiermacher and included a history of Protestant hermeneutics since the Reformation as a second companion volume. He was a broadly educated professor and wrote on many topics. For our purposes, Dilthey was a life-philosopher with a passion for placing the Humanities and Social Sciences on an equal footing with the Natural Sciences by developing a basic methodology for them based on hermeneutics. But in competing with the sciences, he sought an "Allgemeingultigkeit," a universal validity, and in doing so he tended to give too much ground to the way of thinking in the sciences. Still, he is a major figure in the development of philosophical hermeneutics. Ⅲ. The Contribution of Martin Heidegger to Philosophical Hermeneutics before and in Being and Time The decisive turn in the development of a philosophical hermeneutics came in the early writings of Martin Heidegger, a radical and original philosopher. He was in Freiburg an assistant to Husserl and found in Husserl's phenomenology a useful way of overcoming traditional philosophy, but he still found Husserl too preoccupied with scientific validity. Part Ⅰ: Heidegger's Early Lectures: Ontology-the Hermeneutics of Facticity A posthumously published and translated set of Heidegger's lectures on ontology in terms of a hermeneutics of facticity gives us a sense of his understanding of hermeneutics. He bypassed the traditional sense of hermeneutics and went back to the Greek usage of hermeneuein and hermeneia. He attempted to overcome the limitations of modern objectivity by returning to the usages current in ordinary language in ancient Greece. There hermeneutics meant orally interpreting Homer, announcing, translating, and explaining. His account of the history of hermeneutics after Plato and Aristotle is a history of decline and loss of the richness found in Greek usage. But hermeneutics for Heidegger meant a means of access to something, and in these early lectures hermeneutics became an interpretive means of access to facticity, to the realm of pre-interpretive understanding as Dasein faces life. Ultimately hermeneutics became a means for the self-understanding for Dasein. But in a letter to his student, Engelbert Krebs, Heidegger also emphasizes the historical character of cognition. We understand from our situation in history, and our understanding is structured by historically shaped concepts and even our language. Dilthey, too, emphasized the historical matrix for understanding in his hermeneutics, and Heidegger took this up from Dilthey. Heidegger defined hermeneutics in the opening lines of the lectures as "the unified manner of the engaging, approaching, accessing, interrogating, and explication of facticity." Hermeneutics as interpretation is not just understanding as a passive process of cognition but an active engaging, interrogating, and accessing. Facticity itself is interpretive in that it sees what something is through question and answer. Heidegger is stepping back into the factors that precondition our understanding, the "forestructure" of understanding. This forehaving, he says, belongs to the very nature of knowing and understanding. We see something "as "something, and we see it in a specific historical situation. Furthermore, we see it in an existential horizon of expectation, a horizon haunted by uncertainty, by the" fundamental questionability of the future, that is of "possible being," of what is possible for this particular being at this particular time and place. Already in these early works Heidegger finds in the sense of what is possible being, a sense of "ontic questionability, care, restlessness, anxiety, temporality." All of this leads to a new conception of humanity. Instead of being an animal endowed with reason, as in Aristotle, a human being is a being with a possible future, a being with temporality. Humans are beings seeking to know themselves. Hermeneutics, Heidegger says, offers the standpoint for a new conception of the human being. Part Ⅱ: Being and Time The first mention of hermeneutics is in section 7 of Being and Time, where Heidegger is already interpreting phenomenology as letting what is show itself. He finds that " the meaning of phenomenological description as a method lies in interpretation. The logos of the phenomenology of Dasein has the character of hermēneúein. The phenomenology of Dasein is a hermeneutic in the original signification of the word, where it designates the work of interpreting. "In a second sense, Heidegger finds in hermeneutics a means of uncovering the meaning of being for Dasein. And the third sense is the interpretation Dasein as continually making its future possibilities, its future being. Section 31 is important to hermeneutics because there the being of Dasein is said to be understanding. Understanding is the central process of an existing human being. In section 32, titled "Understanding and Interpretation," interpretation builds on understanding. It looks around at the surrounding world and sees things as this or that, always already , never as pure perception. As Heidegger puts it, "The seeing of this sight is always already understanding and interpreting." In other words, there is no pure perception prior to interpretation; there is always the horizon of questioning and interpreting. In section 44, Heidegger argues that truth, too, in its modern forms as statements which are true, is derivative from the deeper processes of understanding and interpreting that are always already going on. But when truth is rightfully defined in connection with being, then it moves into the horizon of fundamental ontology. It is the disclosure of being. This insight is part of what leads him to his view of art, which we will discuss in the next lectur. (shrink)

The article presents a portrait and analysis of the existential-psychocultural situation in postmodern Sweden. Drawing from recent research exploring psychology of religion and existential worldviews, and the Swedish findings from the international World Values Survey, an argument is made for thinking about existential function and dysfunction as public health issues. This is portrayed against the background of Sweden as one of the most secularized countries and simultaneously a country with one of the most encompassing welfare systems. Psychology (...) of religion's updated role here would be to take responsibility for identifying and assessing the categories of function and dysfunction for an existential public health system. This role would also include the planning of policy for societal existential wellbeing, as well as planning prevention and intervention efforts for avoiding existential epidemiology. This new role fits well with public health's third revolution agenda focusing on health, wellbeing and quality of life. (shrink)

Rarely have I encountered a book like All Things Shining. It bravely engages issues that are truly significant for our time, yet flaws run through it like faults in the California landscape. The book has spawned contentious critique unusual for a work by contemporary philosophers. Before I offer my own critical analysis, it is fitting first to appreciate what Dreyfus and Kelly attempt to achieve.The foremost contemporary problems the authors combat are what they term "the burden of choice" and a (...) pervasive mood of nihilistic confusion. They believe the rationalistic and existential programs that are typically advocated in our secular age fail to offer persons convincing grounds for making sustainable decisions. .. (shrink)

This essay discusses the situation of philosophy today in an era of mixed modern, postmodern, and traditional values and social patterns. It argues, with reference to postmodern architecture and to the German philosophers Hegel and Heidegger, that we should reject polarizing conceptual dualities, and that we need to seek out new kinds of less centered and less hierarchical unities that take advantage of the internal tensions and spacings within intellectual and cultural formations. It concludes with a discussion of the (...) promises and problems of dialogue between Eastern and Western philosophies in today’s world. (shrink)

Both existentialists and ethicists have made much of the concept of freedom. While these two camps make very different use of the concept, the relationship between the two is important: the nature and limits of freedom have an important bearing on moral responsibility, while the moral obligations to promote the development of freedom require that we understand just how free thinking is possible. In this paper, I will make some general observations about the prevailing trends in moral thought, both theoretically (...) and culturally. I argue that now as much as in the past, existentialist descriptions of how freedom is experienced are a crucial complement to theoretical work on morality. Specifically, I argue that the uncertainty of our moral horizons and suspicions of the degree to which we are really free makes Nietzsche’s view of freedom a good fit for the ethical work that faces us in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel by Caroline EdwardsMark SchmittCaroline Edwards. Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 277 pp. Paperback, ISBN 9781108712392.The development of the novel as a literary form is closely linked to the representational mode of realism and how it can convey the human experience of time. That the novel distinguishes itself substantially from earlier forms of literature in how it (...) attempts to capture temporality through means of literary realism has been acknowledged ever since Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957). As such, the novel form underwent dramatic changes throughout the periods of modernity and postmodernity, with modernist and postmodernist techniques of representation mirroring shifts in the temporal experience. But how can the contemporary novel—a category itself loaded with implication and definitional problems—of the twenty-first century confront the particular representational challenges of its time? This is the question that Caroline Edwards addresses in her study Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel. Edwards is concerned with the wider repercussions of the post-postmodernist notion of the Fukuyaman thesis of the “end of history” and the profound challenges to this thesis in the face of the post-9/11 unfolding of the twenty-first century. The temporal experience of this century is marked by what Edwards calls “non-contemporaneity,” that is, a “political, and even ontological uncertainty” (9). In the context of contemporary literature, the resulting “temporal disjointedness that marks our experience in the twenty-first century” has “given rise to different expressions of the unevenness of the contemporary, at the level of novelistic structure, prose style, generic sampling and non-mimetic interventions into otherwise realist narratives and juxtaposed timescales” (9). The notion of non-contemporaneity is drawn from Ernst Bloch’s concept of Ungleichzeitigkeit, which Edwards considers to be “productive to thinking about the complexity of [End Page 595] utopian times and the different kinds of pasts and futures that circulate within our own present moment of contemporaneity, which is inescapably non-contemporaneous with itself ” (30). Edwards considers this noncontemporaneity as a prevalent temporal register in contemporary British fiction that speak to the crises of temporality associated with a range of political, social, and economic events and processes that have marked the first decades of the twenty-first century. The seemingly natural unfolding of the “the linear progressive time of neoliberalism” (8), what Mark Fisher has called “capitalist realism,” has increasingly been put into question, not least due to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (158). Similarly, Edwards identifies the 2016 Brexit referendum as symptomatic of a nationalism that must, following Michael Gardiner, always appear to be “out of time” (8). Such crises are thus indicative of anachronistic unevenness and conflicting temporalities. Consequently, a literary fiction that wants to adequately represent these struggles with temporality cannot confine itself to the pitfalls of literary realism, but it would be equally ill-suited by resorting to postmodernist metafiction and irony. Rather, as Edwards contends, the twenty-first-century fictions that she discusses attempt to complicate realist modes by using disruptive and experimental narrative techniques that amount to “non-mimetic experiments with narrative voice and structure” and “delinearised” temporalities (4). With this approach, Edwards argues, these texts interrogate the present as unstable.The four main chapters of Edwards’s book proceed by first establishing the dominant philosophical and theoretical concepts underlying her hypothesis. Chapter 2 (“Reading Fictions of the Not Yet”) is a theoretical and methodological chapter and offers an in-depth engagement with theories of temporality and narratology. Edwards’s aim here is to advocate for an updating of conventional narratology to account for the multilayered narrative experiments with time since modernism and especially in contemporary fiction. Her approach to theorization and analysis is inspired by Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (2010) in the decision to focus on close readings of a small number of primary texts and read them as texts or aesthetic artifacts that develop “theories of their own” (29). The chapter offers an in-depth engagement with Bloch’s philosophy of utopianism and his concept of Ungleichzeitigkeit.Another cornerstone for Edwards’s theory and method is the work of... (shrink)

Drawing on Bernard Lonergan's Method in Theology (1972) I argue that theology can be taught because personal knowledge, of which it is an instance, is at the heart of academic inquiry; and it should be taught because critical engagement with basic ways of taking one's life as a whole (religion in a broad sense) furnishes a critique of the typical oversights of contemporary culture. The appropriation of one's subjectivity entails an awareness of an existential dialectic that pushes towards a (...) decisive option for affirming the possibility and worth of growth in one's powers of self-determination and self-transcendence. Thus conversion—precisely defined in terms of this dialectic—has moral and intellectual dimensions whose promotion goes to the heart of the academic enterprise. By separating out those disciplines (systematics, for example) which are mediated by the existential stance taken by the scholar, Lonergan allows theology to be seen as one world view among others. (shrink)

At first glance it might appear that experimental philosophers and feminist philosophers would make good allies. Nonetheless, experimental philosophy has received criticism from feminist fronts, both for its methodology and for some of its guiding assumptions. Adding to this critical literature, I raise questions concerning the ways in which “differences” in intuitions are employed in experimental philosophy. Specifically, I distinguish between two ways in which differences in intuitions might play a role in philosophical practice, one which puts an (...) end to philosophical conversation and the other which provides impetus for beginning one. Insofar as experimental philosophers are engaged in deploying “differences” in intuitions in the former rather than the latter sense, I argue that their approach is antithetical to feminist projects. Moreover, this is even the case when experimental philosophers deploy “differences” in intuitions along lines of gender. (shrink)

In this article, I revisit the work of the French political philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty. A colleague of Sartre's until their quarrel, he sought to combine existentialism, Marxism and phenomenology. I begin by considering why Merleau-Ponty thought it was important, in confronting the problems of the present, to reconsider past ideas as well as political regimes. I also develop his distinctive methodology of dialectical engagement, his view of politics as a strategic field of forces, and his insistence that philosophy and (...) political action are severed at our peril. In order to illustrate and flesh out all these claims, I return to Merleau-Ponty's treatment of the communist question, placing it within a broader context of his antipathy towards modern rationalism: something he found exemplified by liberal as well as communist regimes. In the course of the discussion, I consider Merleau-Ponty's critiques of Kant, Hegel and Marx as well as his ideas about political agency. However, I also allude at key points in my argument to the relevance of his thinking for our contemporary international situation. (shrink)

Entre la conscience transcendantale et le système spéculatif, la volonté de discours cohérent hésite avant de se trouver invinciblement reconduite à la finitude sans recours de sa position existentielle. De cette histoire de tensions irréductibles résulte pour la philosophie une exigence nouvelle : se comprendre en son originalité comme milieu du sens, d’un sens dialogal librement exigé et partagé, dont la forme vide travaille les interactions de l’existence finie jusqu’à la porter finalement au-delà d’elle-même. The want of a coherent discourse (...) hesitates between the transcendental conscience and the speculative system, before finding itself invincibly taken back to finiteness, without help of its existential position. From this story of irreducible tensions results a new requirement for philosophy : to conceive itself, in its originality, as the milieu of sense, of a dialogic sense freely required and shared, the empty shape of which works on the interactions of the finite existence, up to finally carrying it beyond itself. (shrink)

From Nietzsche to the present, the Western philosophical tradition has been dominated by a secular thinking that has dismissed discussion of God as largely irrelevant. In recent years however, the issue of theology has returned to spark some of the most controversial debates within contemporary philosophy. Discussions of theology by key contemporary philosophers such as Derrida and Levinas have placed religion at centre stage. _Post-Secular Philosophy_ is one of the first volumes to consider how God has been approached by (...) modern philosophers and consider the links between theology and postmodern thought. Fifteen accessible essays present a clear and compelling picture of how key thinkers including Descartes, Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Derrida have made God a central part of their thinking. Each philosopher and how they have approached and criticised theology is placed in a clear historical context. Placing the collection in context with Phillip Blond's outstanding introduction, _Post-Secular Philosophy_ presents a fascinating discussion of the alternatives to the relativism and nihilism that dominate Western thinking. (shrink)

Philosophy and Hip-Hop: Ruminations on Postmodern Cultural Form opens up the philosophical life force that informs the construction of Hip-hop by turning the gaze of the philosopher upon those blind spots that exist within existing scholarship. Traditional Departments of Philosophy will find this book a solid companion in Contemporary Philosophy or Aesthetic Theory. Inside these pages is a project that parallels the themes of existential angst, corporate elitism, social consciousness, male privilege and masculinity. This book illustrates (...) the abundance of philosophical meaning in the textual and graphic elements of Hip-hop, and thus places Hip-hop within the philosophical canon. (shrink)

Why and how do women engage with Buddhism and philosophy? The present volume aims to answer these questions by examining the life and philosophy of a Korean Zen Buddhist nun, Kim Iryŏp (1896–1971). The daughter of a pastor, Iryŏp began questioning Christian doctrine as a teenager. In a few years, she became increasingly involved in women’s movements in Korea, speaking against society’s control of female sexuality and demanding sexual freedom and free divorce for women. While in her late (...) twenties, an existential turn in her thinking led Iryŏp to Buddhism; she eventually joined a monastery and went on to become a leading figure in the female monastic community until her death. -/- After taking the tonsure, Iryŏp followed the advice of her teacher and stopped publishing for more than two decades. She returned to the world of letters in her sixties, using her strong, distinctive voice to address fundamental questions on the scope of identity, the meaning of being human, and the value of existence. In her writing, she frequently adopted an autobiographical style that combined her experiences with Buddhist teachings. Through a close analysis of Iryŏp’s story, Buddhist philosophy and practice in connection with East Asian new women’s movements, and continental philosophy, this volume offers a creative interpretation of Buddhism as both a philosophy and a religion actively engaged with lives as they are lived. It presents a fascinating narrative on how women connect with the world—whether through social issues such as gender inequality, a Buddhist worldview, or existential debates on human existence and provides readers with a new way of philosophizing that is transformative and deeply connected with everyday life. Women and Buddhist Philosophy: Engaging Zen Master Kim Iryŏp will be of primary interest to scholars and students of Buddhism, Buddhist and comparative philosophy, and gender and Korean studies. (shrink)

This article considers the problem of how employees and observers of business ethics behaviors often do not know how to safely and effectively engage with business ethics issues and cases. The ameliorative method of social situational business ethics framing was analyzed. Key parts of the related literature from philosophy, sociology, organizational studies, and business ethics are reviewed. A literature gap between general framing theory and business ethics was identified with respect to the need for social situational framing in business (...) ethics at the micro individual, meso organizational, and macro institutional levels. Theoretical propositions for bridging the literature gap and a wide variety of business ethics engagement case examples are developed as illustrations of and support for the propositions. Practical social situational business ethics framing implications for safe and effective business ethics engagement are considered. (shrink)

Are postmodern philosophy and Christian thought so diametrically opposed that "never the twain shall meet"? Or are various postmodern philosophies, in spite of their secular provenance, open to religious appropriation?

Kolb discusses postmodern architectural styles and theories within the context of philosophical ideas about modernism and postmodernism. He focuses on what it means to dwell in a world and within a history and to act from or against a tradition.

This article takes Vandenberg’s critique of Ream and Ream’s view on the Deweyan learning environment as a departing point to explore the educational meaning of place. The divergence between Vandenberg and the Reams reminds us that the place is not merely a physical site for learners to be located in but also a horizon to be engaged with. Vandenberg and the Reams provide readers with inspirational understandings of Dewey in different aspects. Yet they both seem to give little attention to (...) the point implied in Dewey’s view that learning is a process of existential—embodied and affective—engaging with the place. Drawing on the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, this article aims to retrieve and to highlight the significance of existential engagement of place as an element in the Deweyan process of learning. (shrink)